is anyone doing a locavore thanksgiving this year?

If I get to be home, that was the plan. If I end up staying in the LA area, then no. I'm using a bit wider radius (200 miles), because that's where the farm is where we have our meat raised. They husband a strain of heritage standard bronze turkeys that are so good. The first time I roasted one (3 years ago), I couldn't believe how different it was from typical turkey. Yams, potatoes, other root veggies, brussel sprouts, pumpkin, apples, pears, and flour, all from local sources. Hazelnuts instead of pecans. Washington wines. The rest of the liquor's where the carbon footprint is a size 13.

will you adopt me?

If I'm still down here for your birfday, let's formalize it with a shot of tequila :)

(which is pretty local, really.)

Also,cranberries are local to Seattle. This is happy news.

i actually had no idea that wisconsin grows more cranberries than massachusetts!

I thought they all came from mysterious eastern bogs. But I was also shocked to see blueberries actually growing from Washington shrubbery. Who knew?

Koala tacos: they grow in California scrub.

Is that what that smell is!?!

Have I already told my local turkey story on ILX? Perhaps.

When I lived in the Netherlands, I got sick of people saying that Americans had no cuisine and only ate hamburgers. So I started a tradition among my friends of celebrating Thanksgiving. The concept of gluttony was quite foreign to the Dutch. I baked all kinds of American desserts and dishes to surprise my Dutch friends. Zucchini bread was a particular hit. They also think of corn as cow feed, so it was fun to do yummy stuff with corn. It was always difficult to find turkeys there though. One year I ordered a turkey from a farm half a mile down the road. The farmer and his wife agreed to slaughter a turkey and bring it to my in-laws (now my ex-laws). I had to work late the night before, but my (now ex-) husband was into the whole idea of plucking and dealing with a fresh-killed turkey. He read all about it. I was to meet him at his parents after work and he would have the turkey ready.

When I got there, he and his mom were freaking out. It wasn't dead yet. They had put it in the bathtub to drip blood and it was in this huge garbage bag. The farmer had thought he'd cut or broken the turkey's neck sufficiently, but it was still breathing (head still on). When it breathed (wheezed, really), the garbage bag would inflate and deflate.

We considered various ways of finishing the job, but this was a huge bird with claws and a beak and it rallied energy whenever we got near. We were scared of it.

I should mention that we were "vegetarians" at the time besides eating turkey on Thanksgiving. We thought we'd do the right thing by knowing exactly where the meat was coming from and being in touch with it and all that. What we were doing was really torturing this animal.

We thought about drowning it, stabbing it, etc.

Finally we decided we had to bring it back to the farmer to have him finish the job. By now it was night-time. We managed to get the bird in the car. When we got to the farm, the farmer and his wife were clearly very drunk. They felt so horrible about the situation. It was scary to watch this drunken farmer in his barn finishing off the turkey, but that's what he did. This time the bird was sans head.

Then began a process that took hours of boiling water and pouring it on the bird's skin and plucking. We named it Hairy.

I thought the adrenaline in the bird from the ordeal would affect the taste.

Hairy was actually very, very delicious.

The dutch have no business complaining about anyone's cuisine.