CAUTION: This post contains details of how we obtained a live turkey and prepared it for our Thanksgiving meal. I do not want to offend anyone, or take away from the magic of Thanksgiving. We are simply merging American traditions with Nicaraguan methods. Many families prepare their own meat of all kinds as opposed to purchasing it at a market. I took care not to make this too graphic. You may decide not to keep reading this post.
For thanksgiving this year, we have the privilege of selecting our own live turkey.
The instructions from our host…. You need to get the Turkey drunk on 1 liter of alcohol or the meat will be too tough to eat. You know it’s drunk when it falls over. Then you can butcher it.
Thankfully for us, one of my team mates is a seasoned Eagle Scout with a degree in Animal Science to handle all the details.
After a group excursion to find the right turkey (and paying 2x more than we expected to pay), the group brought the turkey back to the church and put it in a wheel barrel for safe keeping.
Luckily, we had a syringe in one of our medical kits we could use to get the alcohol down its throat. So, we tied up the turkey, and proceeded. But, we did not need the tie we put on the turkey as he responded very quickly in becoming drunk and just laid there. Then our resident expert took the bird up the hill behind the church to take care of business. It was very humane…quick, painless, and not near as bad as I expected.
We planned to boil the bird to remove the feathers, but our contact is late, so some team mates took on the long task of plucking the feathers. The skin is much thicker than American Turkeys, so we had to take it off.
Our skinless, scrawny, Nicaraguan Drunk Turkey tasted pretty good (all things considered). Though parts were still too tough to eat :0)
