I smell like turkey

Yeah, gross. Vegetarians can just stop reading now.

I must admit, much as I like cooking in general and as much as I like eating Thanksgiving turkey, it’s still a little hard to manage that much raw poultry. Nobody likes to be elbow-deep in carcass. A good smoked turkey can save a lot of bird wrangling (just heat and eat!), but this year we’re trying Martha’s Dry-Brined Turkey so this afternoon I found myself rinsing and patting dry 22 naked pounds of the stuff.

I’ve done the surgical-style scrub to the elbows with hot water and soap to no avail. I think I’m going to have to shower to get the smell off.

Food for thought: Totally gross

I could try to come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but this story really is totally gross. Veg(etari)an friends, you might as well stop right here, unless you’re willing to subject yourself to a story that includes “aerosolization of brain tissue.”

This story from the New York Times about a strange disease plaguing some people who worked in pork processing plants reads like a story from Eric Schlosser, though it’s not. The description of the way the brains were removed from the pigs’ skulls made me gag. I’m impressed that the company moved fairly quickly to halt the procedure that seemed correlated with the strange illness the workers developed, but it seems like yet another reason to avoid factory-farmed meat. Even though there’s no evidence that actually eating the pork has caused any problems, the toll on these workers is problem enough.