Zeke and Chester are Dead (Preparing for Thanksgiving)

Zeke and Chester met their destinies yesterday. I have to admit I was a little sorry to see them go. They have been very fun to have around, and they are much smarter than meat chickens. I also learned that there really are turkeys that look like the pictures that used to hang on the wall in my elementary school classroom.

There was a little mixup on their names. Katie said the bigger one was Chester and the smaller one was Zeke, but the rest of us who care to express an opinion think that Zeke was the biggest. I'll call it that way, since I am the one telling the story. Here is a picture of our Tom turkey, Zeke. Isn't he neat? Zeke wasn't fluffed up like that all the time. When he wasn't, he looked pretty much like Chester, only a little bigger and with a lot more of that red fleshy stuff on his face. Chester turned out to be a hen. She wasn't around long enough to get a new name, though. She didn't fluff up her feathers to show off like Zeke did.

Here are their footprints. They are so big and interesting to look at, I had to take a picture.

Here are Russ and the kids with Zeke right before he died.

The first thing Russ did is hang the turkey by his feet on our ladder. Each foot had a baling twine loop around it. The birds relax when they hang like that.

Russ said a quiet, "Thanks, guy, for giving your life so we can eat." Then he cut the jugular vein and let the turkey bleed out into the bucket.

It was a very cold morning. Katie and Charlie were snuggling together to get warm.

After the turkey bled out, Russ dipped it in a pot of hot water that is just the right temperature to scald, but not cook. If it's too hot, it makes the skin come off when the feathers are removed. After scalding, he put the turkey in our Whizbang plucker. He wasn't sure the plucker would handle such a big bird, but we were pleasantly surprised.

There is a rotating plate with rubber fingers on it in the bottom of the plucker. The sides of the drum have rubber fingers, too, but they stay stationary. The bird tumbles arountd in the plucker, and the fingers take all the feathers out. I don't know why it works, but it is amazing! It takes about a minute. Russ runs water in the plucker while it's going to help the feathers wash out and down a hole in the side of the bottom of the drum.

Russ was really excited to know his plucker would handle turkeys. Now he wants to raise ten or twenty next year.
Next came the fun part--gutting them. When Russ got his hand inside, he said, "Wow, there's a lot more room in here than in a chicken!
We saved the gizzards, hearts, and livers for my in-laws, and we gave heads, scraps, and fat to the very happy cats and to Hannah's dog, Maggie, because she is eating for four. The water from cleaning up the table was freezing instantly on the sidewalk. It was cold out there!

Russ put the turkeys in a barrel of water to rest for a bit before he bagged them. At the finish, Chester came out to about 20.5 pounds and Zeke was 24.

Last night we took a drive up to deliver the Thanksgiving turkey to Russ's parents' house where we are having dinner on Thursday. We took corn and squash from our garden, too. Unfortunately when we got there, Russ realized he had brought the smaller bird, and he was a little disappointed. Dad thinks it will still be plenty, though.