Houston, We Have a Turkey

“Sir, is it correct that your box contains turkeys and various meats?” the friendly Delta agent inquired as my husband loaded the 40 lb. box onto the luggage carousal.

The agent along with other holiday travelers wondered out loud whether or not our vacation destination had any of it’s own turkeys for sale.

We were destined for the booming city of Houston, Texas. While it has a plethora of diverse cultures and resulting restaurants and grocery stores, Houston is not known for it’s “local foods” market, which is an ominous situation for a foodie family preparing the Thanksgiving feast.

Faced with the dim prospect of factory-farmed, antibiotic and growth-hormone injected turkeys for dinner, we decided to take the birds on the road.

Our Houstonite clan is a boisterous and fun loving group. Our collective group loves the act of making and eating food. Thanksgiving has morphed into a grand culinary festival, with more and more attendees attending each year. Though they found the extra baggage humorous and a lot of banter and jokes likening our family to the village folks bringing their livestock to the big city were told, the host did not bat an eye when we came bearing gifts of food.

Being that Minnesota is the largest US producer of turkeys, we had to grace this year’s table with a local bird (or two). Heck, even Governor Dayton and Senator Klobuchar took part in shipping a couple of our state’s finest off to the White House; albeit, those turkeys were pardoned by President Obama and spared the broiler and fryer.

Bought from Specialty Meats & Gourmet in Hudson, Wisconsin, we chose two free-range heritage-blend turkeys bred in Thief River Falls. Other travel companions in the “from Minnesota with love” box were a few pounds of ground bison from Eichtens and free range venison from a local Wisconsin farm. In case you’re wondering, the bison was showcased in a huge vat of chili and the venison was minced into tasty Pakistani-style kabobs.

In the third suitcase dedicated solely to locavore gifts, were 15 pounds of Honeycrisp and Haralson apples from Whistling Well Farm.

Yes, we wanted the cousins to experience fantastic-tasting, in-season, local apples, but truth be told, I don’t think we ourselves could survive two weeks away from our apple a day habit. Bouncing around in the suitcase full of apples were local wild-rice, pastas, honey, and delish FunkyChunky sweets.

The laughs and stories that our gifts elicited were priceless. Yes we are a global world- more connected and unified than ever, but this fact doesn’t mean that we have to stop celebrating the unique gems and local craftsmanship from each area of the country/world in which we hail.