Turkey Necks!

I'd never gone out and bought turkey necks before. I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my mother and myself. She has no particular fondness for the turkey bird, and has instead invested her ritual and cullinary Thanksgiving focus on some more eccentric traditional family dishes--particularly saurkraut with pork, mashed potatoes with cream, sweetened stewed tomatoes with lots of butter, and succotash with lots of butter (apparently the West Virginia town my mom is from was heavily settled by German immigrants).

I'm in DC to spoil her rotten as she recovers from an operation, so I was determined to make her these dishes. As I saw it, if there wasn't going to be turkey, there at least had to be turkey gravy. That's where the necks come in. Turkey necks are like a buck something a pound--I wasn't particularly anxious to economize, but there is something very gratifying about cooking with turkey necks in the era historians will one day refer to as the Boneless Skinless Age.

Brown them well, simmer them in water with an onion and some herbs for a couple hours, scrape the surprisingly rich and abundant slivers of meat off before throwing away the bones, and you have the basis for some truly rockin' gravy.

The saurkraut was also a success. I browned a tenderloin in bacon grease, covered it with drained saurkraut, and poured a bottle of beer and a few ounces of gin over it. After a few hours of simmering uncovered over a low heat, the saurkraut had gone from white to light brown, and the pork was tender enough I could break it apart with my spatula.

It did turn out to be about six people's worth of food for two stomachs, but fortunately my brother the vacuum cleaner arrives to spell me tomorrow.

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