Friday, November 23, 2012

Too much food

A lot of food is going to end up in the garbage today.  I wish I knew somebody with a pig, because a pig could eat for two days on the leftovers around here.  Chickens will eat any kind of human food too, but I only have three chickens, so they won't make much of a dent in the excess food around here.  
When I am cooking a meal for family, one of my fears is that we will run out of noodles or mashed potatoes before everybody has had all they want.  Yesterday I made about twice as much of everything as we really needed:  Rolls, mashed potatoes, noodles.  The rolls and noodles can be frozen for another day; not the potatoes.  I could make a lot of potato patties, but let's face it, that isn't the type of food Cliff and I need after pigging out all day yesterday.  
Thank goodness the turkey frame soup I will be making is nutritious, low-calorie, and low-fat.  
If I can remember at Thanksgiving next year, I think I will just make one dessert.  I really don't care what dessert it is, but this surplus is just ridiculous, and all it does is tempt Cliff to eat ten times as much as he should.   


I saw pictures on Facebook yesterday of my youngest granddaughter, Lyndsay, keeping company with some real live turkeys.  Later I went to Cliff Morrow's blog and read a turkey story from his childhood.  I have a few turkey stories of my own, having owned a few in my time.  One thing you need to know about turkeys:  If you start out with half-a-dozen baby turkeys, you will be lucky to end up with one adult.  Turkeys are not the brightest creatures God every placed on this earth.  When we lived on our first little play-farm around 1970, I had a male turkey that insisted on sexually assulting a male duck regularly.  True story.  
When my oldest two grandchildren were four and six years old and lived in Texas, they spent a couple of weeks with us.  I had two or three half-grown turkeys that had survived long enough to be fully feathered-out.  I let them roam freely during the day and shut them in at night.  Four-year-old Amber came inside from playing outside and said, "Grandma, one of your turkeys is swimming in the cow's water."  
What?  Turkeys can't swim!  I rushed out to the cattle's water tank to find a turkey drowning.  From the turkey's view on the ground, he assumed the tank was something with a solid top that he could roost on, flew up there, and found himself in a watery grave.  


The sole survivor of that particular group of turkeys became my mom's pet back when she was living in a mobile home on our place.  She would sit in a lawn chair outside and the turkey would hang out with her, chirping happily.  Unfortunately, that fellow met a terrible death in an accident involving tall weeds and Cliff sickle-mowing a pasture.  I haven't had a turkey on the place since, except for the wild ones that live in the woods.  
Tammy, the young lady in the picture above, is my cousin's daughter.  The picture was taken in 1991.  I was still milking cows then, and the cart in the background on the right has my bucket milkers loaded on it.  
That's Brandy, our mostly-Chow dog, on the left.  She lived to be quite old.  In the barn is the Allis Chalmers D-17 series IV tractor that was the workhorse around here for many years.  
Memories.       

5 comments:

  1. Don't toss those leftovers! Kevin will cry. I'll send him over later today to collect what you want rid of. You know this crew will do away with them.

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  2. I'm glad your daughter wants your leftovers...Might as well let someone else enjoy them. Glad you all had a good Thanksgiving. Ours family will get together tomorrow. I doubt there will be any leftovers, but if they are the kids always fill up containers and take them home with them. Your soup sounds very good. Hopefully I'll be making some too.

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  3. I've never had noodles for Thanksgiving -- sounds yummy. Having family all together for the holidays is a wonderful thing. It was just Will and me this year, at home, mashing potatoes and checking the thermometer in the turkey. Still it was a nice day and he enjoyed himself, eating the fixin's, and watching football. Couldn't ask for more .. . MGW

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  4. Yeah, I've wondered often how the 'turkey' made it to this point. Although the wild ones are wiley enough to survive. Not smarts, just instinct.
    We somehow gto done with the mob with few left overs. A good thing.

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  5. I have one turkey story. We visited a farm of a long-time friend of my mother who had a turkey gobbler running loose in the yard and it chased me. I'd been chased by roosters before, but this was substantially bigger and he scared me quite a bit. The domestic variety of turkey may not be so bright, but the wild turkey does OK.

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