Over this past weekend, my family and I celebrated our Second Thanksgiving since returning from the USA. If one was to ask me what my preferred Thanksgiving is, I’d pick the US version, it comes later in the year and kicks off the Christmas Season (well, it used to) at the right time. Snow is falling and fall is dissolving into Winter.
Thanksgiving in Canada is a practical and parochial affair, marking the end (or is it the middle) of the Harvest. Coming before the snow even starts to fall (it’s going to be in the 70s today and I was sweating out in the muggy morning today if ever there was an upside to Global Climate Problems it’s muggy Octobers), Canadian Thanksgiving is a celebration of the agricultural largesse of the country and the bounties that it provides. Rather than a celebration of gorged appetites and pre-Christmas shopping. No Black Friday here, you see.
Despite my preference for the American version, I dutifully invited my In-Laws over to the townhouse for a meal (My Sister in Law declined, in order to work) and we bought what we thought would be a decent sized, but still quite small Turkey. In the end our 27 dollar monster turned out to be far more than we could easily handle and provided us with the raw materials for at least a weeks worth of meals if we played our cards right.
Two legs for soup, dark meat too. Two immense halves of the breast for sandwiches and just sliced for meals. The remaining bulk turned into curry and soup meat. The Bones were boiled overnight to make a nice stock, along with the carcass of a Chicken cooked on Saturday. The remaining greasy bits were disposed of, I hate to do that and wished for a bigger stock pot to boil the remaning “meat” out of them. It would need to be strained, but I could have had three big soup pots out of the remaining bits alone, I’m sure.
We’re trying to wring all we can from our nearly 30-Dollar Turkey, but it’s just so much. I’m tempted to return to our old rule of buying the more expensive (but utilitarian) Breast Only Turkey. Which I’m sure makes the whole waste matter all the worse, but at least I don’t throw out the bits and pieces on my own, you know?
Are Turkey bits good for Composting? Should I compost meats? I don’t know, I should look into that.
However, this is not really about the Turkey that sits in my Fridge and soup pot today. I’m actually looking at a much bigger Turkey today.
Canada prospered for a while in the hands of the Tories, but even my cursory and shallow understanding of the position of the Canadian Dollar and it’s buying power has revealed that the “prosperous” Canadian economy is really only so when the Petrodollar is valuable. Which is what the Harper Government has led us into. The whole value of the Canadian Dollar is tied to the price of Oil, and as that price slides, so too do the prospects of Canadians in terms of buying power and position on World Markets. Canada lives and dies on it’s raw materials exports and the Harper Government has, for the most part let this slide in deference to the Thanksgiving Banquets to the south. Of course, Thanksgiving isn’t for another month and a bit in the US and it looks like this might be the leanest in years. Instead of gorging on our Resources, it may be that they are sipping them from a thousand cuts and another Harper government may allow the cheap death of Canada to continue. Our National Turkey indeed.
