The Sustainable Fair

Thanks to all who came to the Sustainable Fair at the Farm Museum last Saturday and tried our food and took a business card.

Mike and I cooked grass fed burgers and merguez lamb sausage for the fair and we met a lot of wonderful people!

Although we didn't meet or talk to anyone during the blur that was 12:15-1:45pm when it took all our powers to keep up with the line. Thank goodness for our wonderful children who have great customer service skills. If we ignored you during that time, please forgive us and come visit the farm and we'll talk for hours!

It was great to meet the folks who know a lot about sustainable agriculture as well as the folks who watched Food Inc for the first time and got a big shock about their food. Welcome to the club-- knowledge is a dangerous thing and hard to go back and pretend you don't know once you do know.

Speaking of things that I didn't know. We are ready to take orders for Turkeys. This year we are doing Bronze Turkeys and we'll only do 40 birds so place your order now.

Did you know that there is no way that all the folks who want 'fresh' turkeys could actually get 'fresh' turkeys given the number of turkeys that can be killed per hour the week before T-day.

So 'fresh' is technically defined in turkey standards as anything that has not been frozen. Now turkeys have a high salt content so they can be in a fridge/freezer at 28 F and technically they are still labeled as 'fresh'. Have you ever got a 'fresh' turkey and wondered why it was kind of crispy cold? That's why. It's probably a month old as you can't process all the demand in 1 week. You need a good month prior to spread out the work. So it's not technically frozen but it is slightly frozen so that it can keep for the time before T-day.

Our turkeys will be 'processed' the Saturday or Sunday before T-day. So they will be fresh. Though if you've read my other postings you know that I'm also skeptical about fresh poultry being really tender so I've got more reading and research to do. I can tell you that my turkey that was 5 days aged was perfectly tender on T-day last year. And it cooked fast-- I mean fast. So a really, really fresh turkey will cook in almost 1/2 the time.

Preorder your turkeys now!!!