Day 2 of my challenge and it’s technically already day 3. So, off to a swell start!
My favorite part of Thanksgiving each year actually comes at breakfast, when my father fries up the turkey liver and heart in a mix of spices with bacon, shallots, sherry, and (sometimes) raisins. We serve it all with toast and a crisp glass of wine. It’s a perfect meal for many reasons: deeply savory, nutritionally rich, not too heavy, and eaten long before our palates have been spoiled for dinner, before we’ve grown sick of the scent of turkey in the kitchen. It’s also a moment of whole-animal eating, which doesn’t exactly justify the turkey’s death but does honor its sacrifice a little. We savor each part of the bird.
(I’ll confess that I like to eat meat, which is somewhat unfashionable and morally fraught. I’m trying to eat less of it. I wish I liked it less – I know friends who love the taste but hate the way it makes them feel, but I’ve always felt fortified by it, at the cellular level. I try to eat it sparingly, but I do love it. Of course, it has its costs. The other day, I had a carnitas burrito at a place I used to like in DC that hasn’t aged well. I ordered the meat on autopilot and as I ate it – flat, old, over-peppered to disguise its old flatness – I felt deep regret for the animal. I felt sad for the pig who gave its life for my mediocre burrito; for my own frivolous violence. So, as I said: morally fraught.)
In any case, this year, my father couldn’t find the heart, which was fine because for all my love of the ritual, I’ve never actually liked eating it. Where the liver has a pleasant taste and texture, like sweet and smooth like clay, the heart is tough and chewy. We ate just the liver and had no complaints. But later, as I picked at the remaining giblets for stock, I spied a valve.
“Is this the heart?” I asked my father, holding up an organ almost the size of my fist. The organ was in pieces, clear divisions between the tissue. “Too large,” he said. “I think that’s the gizzard.” But he agreed the valve was curious. We looked at it together for some minutes before he had an idea. He touched the walnut sized top piece where the valve was visible and gently pulled it loose. There the heart was, tiny and elegant in his fingers. I took all the pieces back to the stock pot, cradling the heart in my palm, and dropped them in.
When the stock had been boiling for 30 minutes, I fished out the neck to cut off the meat. It was tender, though still attached tightly to the bones in some places. I started with a fork but found it much easier to work with my fingers, smoothing them along the vertebrae. The neck bones were cinched together like a rosary, the knobs interlocking. If I held them in a straight line, I could look through the central tunnel where the nerves once sat.
Is it weird that holding an animal’s bones gave me such a feeling of reverence? Taking the bones of the bird we’d eaten in my hands, I felt an enormous gratitude for its body, which fit together so perfectly – and in turn for my own body, with its own gently nestled and exquisitely arranged bones. I saw the wonder of the turkey’s small heart and thought of my own heart no bigger than a fist. Eating meat is violent, but it is also strangely intimate. It can mean holding another body in your own hands and glimpsing all the things it kept hidden in life. Anatomical secrets. Feats of biological engineering. I felt a real sense of awe, that we – the turkey and I alike – walked around like marionettes, stacks of bones moved by pulleys and strings and kept alive by tiny hidden hearts. Pretty cool.
And on that note…
Leftover Turkey & Wild Rice Soup
*A recip-ish, ispired by the flavors of tortilla soup
First, make a turkey stock, which takes 4-6 hours. Add in the leftover turkey carcass, stripped of meat, and any bones, especially wing bits. Add a whole onion, two smashed garlic cloves, carrot, celery, and some salt, depending on how you seasoned your turkey. Also, a bay leaf. Cover with water and gently simmer.
When it comes time to make the soup, sauté diced onion, carrot, and a jalapeño in a few glugs of olive oil until the onions are starting to soften and go translucent. Add about 4 cloves of garlic, minced, and stir so they release their fragrance, for less than a minute. Toss in a half teaspoon of cumin and coat the vegetables. A pinch of salt.
Ladle in stock, six cups or so. Add one or two diced tomatoes, 1/4 cup of tomato paste, and one or two (or more) chopped chipotle chiles from a can with adobo sauce, as well as some spoonfuls of the sauce. Add a small fistful of cilantro, coarsely chopped, and another spoonful of cumin. Taste, and adjust seasonings, including salt. I had wild rice and turkey meat left over from Thanksgiving, so I added them in here, but if you don’t, you could add the meat in to boil. When ready to serve, turn off the heat and add lime juice and zest to taste.
I recommend serving it with lime wedges, sliced jalapeños, cilantro, and fritos/tortilla strips. I also thinly sliced cabbage, which I like to toss with a sauce: a few spoonfuls of sour cream, spoonfuls of adobo sauce from the chipotle can (to taste), salt, and the juice of a lime or two. Toss just before serving, as the cabbage will go limp if it sits.
979 words (! I need to cut these down…), Day 2/10
Ana Olson 