More uses than just floor stain...

RLLigman said:
Have you ever been able to get wild turkey legs and thighs to convert into anything not too tough to eat? Did you airfry thos turkey nuggets? Steve cooked some for five hours sous vide and brought then to duck camp last fall along with a bunch of pheasant legs and thighs. I combined the turkey with the stock from slow simmering the pheasant legs and then added some dried oyster mushrooms after simmering this for about three hours with some spices, Heated it up the following night and discovered it was a waste of good oyster mushrooms. We use fresh sage in any recipe that calls for lemon zest since it adds that sharper fresh flavor with some tanginess like citrus.

Beyond egg predators and coyotes, you likely don't have that many top predators or high winter severity levels to markedly impact turkey survivorship..
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The legs, with their tendons intact, are oven browned and go into the stock and are pressure cooked. Jen picks the legs and carcass and makes soup (this batch is wild rice and sweet potato and used the leftover stock that didn't get jarred). I do not love the picked leg meat, but the soup is very good and I'm glad it gets used. I have a hard time getting inspired to cook with it, but she does. The thighs (and carcass trim too small for nuggets) were the genesis of the sausage. By using pork belly with its 1:1 fat to meat ratio (rather than backfat) it stretches the dark meat a bit and makes it milder as a sausage. It is very, very good sausage, but not a great celebration of turkey goodness since it is cut with so much pork (3T:2PB). Nuggets are deep fried. We do have an air fryer in our new range, but I do not think I can get it to produce a nugget as perfectly moist on the inside, yet absolutely crisp on the outside as deep fat frying. I deep fry a couple times a week for concentrated periods and then don't deep fry for months. If I'm going to allocate calories to a battered or breaded food product it has to be perfect, so I deep fry. Air frying veg like broccoli, sweet potatoes or brussels sprouts - that happens several times a week here and produces a great product.

Turkey numbers and harvest has declined in CT over the past 20 years like most of the east. Causes are unknown. I've called in an awful lot of coyote, bobcat and fox when turkey hunting over the years.
 
Dani said:
That stock looks excellent. I have considered canning just so I can keep stock in my pantry vs my freezer.

Turkey legs I mostly turn into soup and it is really good that way. I like the thighs on the grill, though I usually add them to the legs to make soup or stock. I smoked a wild turkey once and the thighs were quite tasty but the legs were very tough (not surprising).
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I love the process of canning, it is an important and satisfying step for me. Much like reloading, lots of random steps, and the end product is a beautiful capsule that is very useful. Not fun if you are rushing, but if you have the time and putter around while working on it, it is great.
 
tod osier said:
I love the process of canning, it is an important and satisfying step for me. Much like reloading, lots of random steps, and the end product is a beautiful capsule that is very useful. Not fun if you are rushing, but if you have the time and putter around while working on it, it is great.
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I like puttering like that in the kitchen. Only person in my family who actually cans anything anymore is my uncle living in Alaska. They canned a ton of fish this fall when it became apparent that they were going to be in Alaska for the winter because of Covid. I'm hoping that I can get out there in the fall in the next few years to chase birds and maybe he will show me how to can.
 
This is a fabulous recipe for turkey legs & thighs. I've made it several times successfully.

https://honest-food.net/turkey-leg-stew-recipe/

I have made many of Hank's recipes and loved every one.
 
Ted --- can you be more specific on the ingredients for the sausage? I looks like it would work for geese.

Joe
 
Tod,
Awesome string of posts. I just finished smoking a turkey breast on apple wood two days ago and I had my doubts but it was amazing. The rest of the bird is in the freezer waiting on inspiration to strike.

Out of all the things to comment on in your pictures I am going to point out the spare motor kicking around the boat. There must be a story.
 
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Thanks.

Look at it this way, you could have been the guy in Colorado who called in what looked like an adult cougar and two kits to his turkey set-up! One of the kits looked to have closed to inside ten yards when it spooked and turned to follow the adult who had already turned away. I have had coyotes come in quite frequently to goose sets up here.
 
Brandon, mesquite, cherry and alder are all good smoking woods for birds. Apple is one of my favorite woods to smoke all Great Lakes fish-even bullheads. For wild turkey a waterbath smoker does well to keep the finished bird from drying-out too much. Sharptails cold smoked over mesquite and then quick grilled are excellent, particularly with currant jelly or hot mango chutney on the side. The monks in the monestary up in the Keweenaw make a great current and thimbleberry jam, among there array of jams. If it is too sweet for your tastes, just fold it into a red wine reduction to serve as a sauce. If you are cooking sharpies over charcoal, wet some mesquite chunks and only load one quadrant of the Weber with coals. Place the wet wood chunks over the coals and the meat on the grate section that has no diret heat coming up to cook indirectly If you really want to get creative, dig some rhizomes out of a cattail stand well away from road runoff. Prep them as you would a ginger root and steam them via a makeshift set-up with a colander set inside a stew or soup pot about 1/4 filled with water for about ten minutes.

If you have access to heritage pork- pork belly or pork butt cuts for sausage making with particularly strong meats like venison, pronghorn, and goose/swan, using it adds another layer of wild flavor. For sausage making, the closer you can keep any meat to frozen the "happier" your grinder will be.
 
Joe Daly said:
Ted --- can you be more specific on the ingredients for the sausage? I looks like it would work for geese.
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Joe Daly said:
Joe
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Nearly all my sausage recipes (especially the salt to meat and meat to fat ratios) start at Charcuterie, by Ruhlman and Polcyn. Excellent book. His breakfast sausage recipe is great.
 
Brandon Yuchasz said:
Tod,
Awesome string of posts. I just finished smoking a turkey breast on apple wood two days ago and I had my doubts but it was amazing. The rest of the bird is in the freezer waiting on inspiration to strike.

Out of all the things to comment on in your pictures I am going to point out the spare motor kicking around the boat. There must be a story.
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Thanks Brandon, no story to the kicker other than where I spend most of my time on the coast I'm not walking home if I have a motor failure. I'm usually doing 5 mile plus runs out to offshore islands. That little kicker pushes the boat along nicely and I like having it along for piece of mind.
 
RLLigman said:
Thanks.

Look at it this way, you could have been the guy in Colorado who called in what looked like an adult cougar and two kits to his turkey set-up! One of the kits looked to have closed to inside ten yards when it spooked and turned to follow the adult who had already turned away. I have had coyotes come in quite frequently to goose sets up here.
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After the comment about predators, I called in a coyote in closer than I've ever had one this morning. Same tree I've called another coyote and bobcat to in past seasons. Coyote came in running after my first series of yelps at sunrise on a course that would take him by me at 10 yards on a parallel path. As he got closer, I reached for my shotgun with my left hand keeping still otherwise and he saw the movement and sped up . I was thinking he spooked, but he had keyed in on the movement of my arm and started to hook directly at me at nearly full speed. I could see his eyes searching trying to figure out what he was after. When he was between 10 and 15 feet I chickened out and stood up sending him rocketing off. No way he wouldn't have at least run across my boots had I not stood up.
 
Found it:

[VIDEO] Hunters accidentally call multiple hidden mountain lions to their location | OutThere Colorado


My guess is the cat crossing in the backround is an adult female...with the other two, her kits.

I had an adult follow me around while I was measuring-up stream crossing culverts and loading GPS points to demarcate the edge of a group of wetlands that constituted the head waters of the Sucker River southwest of Grand Marais I saw movement twice via my peripneral vision before I finally turned around in time to see it dart across the woods road. We had another one leap across our trail as we were returning from a day hike up high to try and photograph some bighorns on some high-country meadows in northwest Yellowstone Park. He was more interested in the two elk that were bugling at each other than the four of us, but it was right at dusk as we were losing the light, so it added some fake melodrama to the last half hour of our hike down to the trailhead in the dark...and a good story told over a dinner of fried potatoes and cutthroat fillets cooked via headlamp. We had initially intended to fish Cougar Creek instead of climb Bighorn Peak...
 
Looks good tod. Today I left the hunting to Andrea and went American Shad fishing for my first real time. It was a hoot. Still need to figure out how to debone them (there's something like 1300 bones in a Shad- and the skill isn't practiced by many anymore). Anyways, I got 2 with big hog roe sacks and the rest had milt (from the males). I quickly googled "Shad roe male," learned they were called milt, then googled that. Hank Shaw mentions them but say he wasn't adventurous to try them (surprising). Found an article from some Nutmegger website and followed it. Floured, saut?ed in butter, seasoned with salt and pepper and some wild ramp flakes from last season (we need to go picking this weekend) on top of homemade French bread. Holy heck were they good!View attachment 4B6FFDD1-E231-45FD-8D8A-D23E95C6941F.jpeg
 
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Nick Zito said:
Looks good tod. Today I left the hunting to Andrea and went American Shad fishing for my first real time. It was a hoot. Still need to figure out how to debone them (there's something like 1300 bones in a Shad- and the skill isn't practiced by many anymore). Anyways, I got 2 with big hog roe sacks and the rest had milt (from the males). I quickly googled "Shad roe male," learned they were called milt, then googled that. Hank Shaw mentions them but say he wasn't adventurous to try them (surprising). Found an article from some Nutmegger website and followed it. Floured, saut?ed in butter, seasoned with salt and pepper and some wild ramp flakes from last season (we need to go picking this weekend) on top of homemade French bread. Holy heck were they good!
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I love shad roe, fillets are OK, never had milt sacs. I've never fished for them and always wanted to, but never made it happen. I've read McPhee's "Founding Fish" and that is as close as I've got. :( I saw reports that the run is on right now. One of those things I need to do before I leave the state. The river is a little far for those early mornings for me, I hear there are places that you can get a couple roe shad and a bucket of fiddleheads - that would be sweet.

Tough to pull away from turkeys this time of year!
 
Just keeping it real. :). I get to hunt too.

I set up on a bird before daybreak in the rain on a ridge that I've worked a lot of birds from over the years. He wouldn't budge, but a second bird sounded off about 400 yards away on the roost and then strolled over and was down about a half hour after sunrise. Nice. Got him in the chiller before 9 and spent the day running errands (I'm always amazed that it is less expensive to get the oil changed in the Superduty than the Prius).

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