Thanksgiving Turkey

As my wife is fond of saying, we started Thanksgiving dinner last Easter by setting 18 Narragansett turkey eggs into an incubator. From those 18 eggs we only had three turkeys make it to maturity one of which was white (not the proper coloring for a Naragansett).
We augmented our flock with two birds from Springfield Farm to make sure that we would have a breading pair.

All told we ended up with three Toms one Hen and the aforementioned white. In order to allow the bird to age appropriately and to avoid grossing out some house guests I processed one of the Toms and the white one the weekend before Thanksgiving. After plucking and cleaning our Tom weighed in at ten and a half pounds. The white went into the deep freezer and will be dinner sometime this winter.

On Thanksgiving we also cooked a store bought thirteen pound bird, to ensure leftovers and placate my mother who was somewhat leery of eating our homegrown bird. While our bird was a few pounds smaller it was considerably taller (our turkey is on the left).

All said and done the turkey was delicious and it was great that the potatoes and beans were also grown on our farm.