[Razzz42]

...But a month later, we were all good and tired of the noisy turkeys. One afternoon, my father came over and while I held the birds, with a pair of giant hedge trimmers, he took off their heads. It occurred to me standing there with those two unwieldy birds dead at my feet that I could just put them in the trash. But no, I couldn't. I set up an old propane burner in the driveway, boiled a 10-gallon pot of water and dipped those heavy turkeys, one at a time, grasping them by their scaly feet. Then in the wintry dusk, I crouched in the gravel and plucked them bare; the feathers came off in wet fistfuls.

Gutting those monumental birds took close to an hour, an unpleasant, squishy hour, and left behind an Everest of gore on the kitchen counter. Nothing was less appetizing than the idea of popping those turkeys in the oven, so I put them in black garbage bags, rubber-banded them shut, and stuffed them into the freezer. It felt more like cleaning up a crime scene than putting aside stores for the winter... click here

[AnAmericanMother]

Oh, for pete's sake, what a whiner.

Jenny, next time I field dress a deer you can come help hold the garbage bag for the gut pile. Then complain about a couple of turkeys. Or you can help me clean half a dozen pheasants. Quail are too easy . . . .

Freezing without airtight sealing will dry out meat horribly. You could have brined them and that would have helped. It would have been better to eat them straight away. It also would have been better if you had specially fed them with an eye to the table rather than letting them hang around for ages eating whatever.

[A_perfect_lady]

If I had to kill my own food, I’d be a vegetarian. I just can’t do it. Not to something that hasn’t done anything to me.