Gotta love a good story. Hearing, reading or spinning a good yarn. There’s nothing better. I have a few in my repertoire that I tell over and over and over. (My husband still nods politely or gasps on cue even if he isn’t listening to a word of it). Here are my top five favorite subjects:
1. “I shouldn’t have survived that.”
2. “Dangerous encounters with wildlife.”
3. “Getting lost in foreign and domestic lands.”
4. “Weird things my kids do.”
5. “Grossest things I’ve eaten.”
On that note, I’ve got one that falls into category number five that I tell EVERY year right around Thanksgiving. So, you’ve been warned. Reader discretion advised.
It was Thanksgiving 2003. I flew on a snowy evening from Portland, Oregon, to Missoula, Montana, to spend the holiday with my good friends, Bill and Emily.
In preparation, Bill had shot a turkey for the feast. So, we spent an entire day cooking. We made cranberry sauce—the best cranberry sauce I’ve ever tasted, I might add. We made gourmet stuffing with every herb under the sun. We snapped and cooked beans. We peeled and boiled potatoes and carrots. We watched dough rise for rolls. We even baked squash. We made not one pie, but three— two pumpkin and one blueberry.
As an environmentalist, writing on an environmental blog, I have to add that not one scrap of food was wasted. Bill and Emily ate leftovers for weeks, so be assured that we were being just a little gluttonous. Well, the pumpkin pie for breakfast the next morning was a little over-the-top excessive but back to the story…
After all that preparation, we sat down to eat somewhere around 7 o’clock at night. We heaped our plates full and dug in. It was all that we hoped it would be.
I was well into this interesting side dish before I paused to wonder why I couldn’t remember fixing it. It looked to be grains of different varieties, or maybe grasses, with berries mixed in.
I turned to Bill and Emily to ask, “What IS this?”
Bill jumped out of his bean bag chair and exclaimed, “I FORGOT TO CLEAN THE TURKEY’S CROP!”
Not only did we not waste a morsel but we also reused the turkey’s dinner. Now that I think about it—what great environmentalists we were that Thanksgiving in 2003.
—by Stacie Haines, NRCM Membership Director
Gross. I love it.