Nau speak: Thanksgiving Ritual 2018

Fields burst with ripening fruits and vegetables, gorgeous gourds in a startling array of shades crowd fields with their vines and rotund bodies. Autumn time is a prodigious season for feasting, with so many varied crops coming to full harvest and abundance, well, prominently abundant. Given this state of affairs, and a particular set of historical myths and traditions built upon the mistreatment and forcible expunging of indigenous people from their homes in "The New World" by land and resource hungry Europeans, most citizens of the United States these days find themselves celebrating a holiday dubbed "Thanksgiving". Ostensibly, the holiday is a period of reflection and a time to pause and be grateful for the many blessings we may be so fortunate to have in our lives, which in and of itself is a nice message... There's nothing wrong with appreciating what you have and being mindful of it, but there are some issues with trampling over the historical facts leading to the situation for more euphemistic ideas.

Anyhow, to celebrate this time of year, many Americans opt to roast, fry, or otherwise find a means of preparing a turkey. Antho and I wanted to partake in this ritualistic consumption of big birds since we had access to a full oven for the first time in quite a while, though it was just the two of us celebrating so we opted for a smaller roughly 8 pound bird. Still, that's quite a lot of bird to work through, but we had no issues eating leftovers on sandwiches or in soups over the next week! I always save the vegetable scraps and shrapnel from the bird's carcass, bones, and skin along with whatever leftover bits remain, as I use it to make stock/broth. This means my stocks and broths are always perpetually changing and evolving with whatever vegetables and meats we're eating the most, along with what's in season. To each their own, but it works for us! Since I roasted the turkey with lemons stuffed into it's gaping innards cavern, they went in with the stock, lending it a nice citrusy tang along with boosting the vitamin and mineral content of the end result. Can't really go wrong with that when there are so many bugs going around, right? I've got a case of the sniffles as I write this, in fact...