Topics:  Party Like the Pilgrims!; Herb-Infused Drinks; Native American Corn

Guests:

Kris Wetherbee , contributing editor, THE HERB COMPANION
A contributing editor for the magazine, Wetherbee is an internationally published author, writer and award-winning recipe developer. Kris lives in western Oregon and is a popular speaker on natural health, food and gardening topics. She will discuss using herbs to create delicious feasts that more closely resemble The First Thanksgiving.

K.C. Compton , Editor in Chief, THE HERB COMPANION
Compton is a nut for natural cooking. When she’s not working on the magazine, you can find her in the kitchen whipping up a delicious meal with fresh herbs (of course!), indulging in an herb-infused beauty treatment or singing with her folk band, Checkered Past. Compton will give us tips on making herb-infused beverages and cocktails for the holidays.

Cheryl Long , Editor in Chief, MOTHER EARTH NEWS
Long is a leading advocate for more sustainable lifestyles. She lives on an 8-acre homestead near Topeka, Kan., powered in part by solar panels, where she manages a large organic garden and a small flock of Welsummer chickens. Long will discuss why corn should have a place on every Thanksgiving table, including tips about best varieties and preparations. She’ll also reveal the Project of the Week: Using Leftover Thanksgiving “Indian Corn.” 

Topics: woodworking, saving energy, saving money, DIY projects, sustainable seafood, ocean conservation, Thanksgiving, vegetarianism and homemade paper.

Guests:

Spike Carlsen , author of A Splintered History of Wood

Carlsen is an editor, author, carpenter and woodworker, who has been immersed in the world of wood and woodworking for more than 30 years. He is former Executive Editor of Family Handyman magazine where he wrote hundreds of articles on home improvement and oversaw the creation of dozens of books including the revised Readers Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual. He has written articles for Old House Journal, Fine Homebuilding, Workbench, The Minneapolis Star Tribune and other publications. Carlsen discusses saving energy to save money with easy DIY projects.

Alison Barratt , Communications Associate Manager, Monterey Bay Aquarium

Barratt discusses how the aquarium is celebrating 25 years of ocean conservation, as well as the impacts of plastics on Laysan albatross and the Monterey Bay Aquarium's program to alert visitors to this issue. She also about a fun seafood-full, turkey-free Thanksgiving!

Anna Thomas , author of a new cookbook, Love Soup 

Thomas is one of the founders of the vegetarian and fresh foods movements and the author of the new cookbook Love Soup: 160 All-New Vegetarian Recipes. She discusses minimal meat Thanksgiving meals.

Cheryl Long , editor in chief, MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Long shares the Project of the Week: Ultimate Paper Recycling. Learn how to heavy-duty notepaper. It's fun and easy to do — a great project for these cool fall evenings at home with the family. After the paper has dried, you can use some autumn-themed rubber stamps to jazz up your new homemade cardstock.

Listen Now!  

It's been getting around the playground at my son's school that I bought a $95 turkey for Thanksgiving this year. The consensus has run somewhere between general disbelief and the statement that my turkey sure better be laying some golden eggs to justify the expense. So, let me back up and explain.

Late last spring I heard a local farmer discussing his pasture-raised beef on our local NPR station. The farm, Thundering Hooves, also offers pasture-raised, heritage turkeys, but you'd better get your act together because they sell out as soon as they go on sale in July.

Who wants to think about Thanksgiving in July? Well, I for one, and it certainly appears that plenty of others do as well. So, we dutifully ordered our turkey as soon as we could and have been diligently waiting ever since. The turkeys were processed a few weeks ago and we picked ours up last weekend. We'll be roasting it rather simply since we want to be able to really taste the meat and see how it compares to the standard breeds.

How's it Heritage? 

This bird is a rare heirloom Unimproved Standard Bronze. Thundering Hooves keeps their own flock so the eggs are produced and incubated on site (rather than chicks purchased from another grower). According to their website:

"There are extremely limited numbers of breeding flock [of unimproved turkeys] left in the country. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy estimated that in 1987 there were 'less than 300 breeding hens' found in America with the possible exception of a limited number of turkeys used by hobbyists and show goers."

These birds are becoming endangered simply for the fact that turkey growers are breeding birds that have larger amounts of white meat. I'm sure you've heard of some commercially grown broad-breasted birds that are so busty they can barely walk and are so far removed from nature that they don't know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated in order to breed. A more thorough examination of the issues with commercial turkeys is made in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Out to Pasture

Most commercially grown turkeys are raised in confined and cramped quarters, given little access to the outside (if at all) and are fed a limited and unnatural diet. This makes for a very low-quality life for the turkey and some argue that it results in a less flavorful and nutritious meat.

Pasture raising is a method of raising flocks that is more than just "free range," which generally means that the birds have access to a small outdoor area that they may or may not actually use. On the other hand, our pasture-ranged turkey roamed freely in the fields, eating bugs, grasses and vegetarian feed. The birds on the farm are free to roam about as they please and their roosts are periodically moved throughout the field. This is generally referred to as pasture rotation and it allows the birds access to new areas of grass and bugs for their dining enjoyment.

Eat Local for Thanksgiving 

Not only was it important for us to purchase a turkey that is raised sustainably and preserves a heritage breed, but it was important for us to buy local. Each year I host an Eat Local campaign urging individuals and families to choose local foods for their Thanksgiving table. Not only does it help support local farmers, but the reduction in transportation of foods also results in lower carbon emissions, some say as much as 2.2 lbs of CO2 per plate of local foods chosen.

So, if you are interested in joining the movement to Eat Local for Thanksgiving, stop by and sign the pledge!

OK, some of you make it all from scratch, right? But others who generally stay away from the oven all year decide to fire it up for that one special something. And the holiday just wouldn't be the same without it, right? Or maybe you have a great memory of making something from scratch and sharing it with someone else for Thanksgiving. (Are you the guest who always brings the best made-from-scratch take-alongs even when you've been told not to bring anything?)

At our house, everyone goes crazy if my dad doesn't make his famous apple-oyster stuffing with homemade cornbread. Hey Dad, you remembered to put fresh oysters on the grocery list this year, right??? Mother Earth News contributing editor Barbara Pleasant remembers fondly making a pecan pie just for herself even when she was living alone: "and it was wonderful!"

So how about you? Please share your "wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it" and "just gotta make it from scratch" stories, as well as your stories about filling Thanksgiving needs through generosity, by posting them in the comments section below.

If your Thanksgiving repertoire could use some new ideas, too, then we've got a seat for you at our table.

Attention Vegetarians and Vegans: You too can have an enjoyable, delicious Thanksgiving dinner without compromising your lifestyle!

There are plenty of websites out there that offer meatless Thanksgiving Day menus. Many of them have complete, 3- to 5-course menus that are appetizing even if you’re not a vegetarian.

The appetizers usually consist of a variety of salads and soups. An obvious choice would be the Pumpkin Soup. Many of the sites have this recipe, but I thought this recipe looked interesting because it calls for a little sour cream. And don’t worry, this soup uses vegetable broth, not chicken.

Pasta dishes and vegetarian gratin would be nice main dish selections, such as this recipe for Three Sister Stew, which features the Ancient Three Sisters: corn, squash and beans.

Dessert could really be anything, so pick your favorite and make it for the whole family! Pumpkin pie is a more traditional choice if you want to go the traditional route, but one site I found has a lot of unique suggestions for desserts.

If you think about it, the only part of the Thanksgiving meal that traditionally features meat is the turkey. And with tofu turkey and other main-course selections, a vegetarian Thanksgiving meal doesn’t have to be that different from the original.

Here’s a list of some websites to help you plan a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner:

   * The Veggie Table

   * Boutell.com 

   * In a Vegetarian Kitchen

   * Farm Sanctuary

   * Recipe Zaar

PHOTO BY JENNA WOGINRICH

Will this turkey become Thanksgiving dinner?

Back in May when I was driving to pick up my spring chicks, I wasn't planning on also picking up dinner to-go. But when I arrived at the feed store I discovered I could go home with a free-range turkey dinner for five bucks. Well, if I wanted to raise my own that is...

Inside the brooder crates holding their chirping throngs there were a half-dozen random turkey poults for sale. They were orphans from an abandoned order and had no farmer to raise them. In an act of homesteader-impulse I took one of the broad breasted white poults home with my laying hens and goslings. The plan was to raise him along with the other birds, but unlike his egg-laying siblings, he would be for the holiday table. On the ride back to Cold Antler, I called my parents in Pennsylvania to announce that Thanksgiving Dinner was on me this year. Which is a weird call to get if your daughter is a vegetarian. But that's another story.

Raising a turkey turned out to be an easy and rewarding experience. Since it was the lone gobbler in my chicken coop, it seemed to get along fine with my flock. Some farmers warn never to mix your turkeys and other poultry together, and I suppose in larger numbers that is sound advice. But my little guy never showed any aggression or caused any problems in the henhouse. He lived out his summer as a free range yard bird, plodding behind the geese and chickens. Spending his nights in the safety of the coop on soft straw. I was proud to have him here on the farm, which generally only produces eggs, wool, and vegetables. And being able to hold a three-day-old poult in your palm in the spring, and then help pluck its feathers on harvest day in late October was a wholesome lesson in the source of one family's entree. It felt really good to know I was producing food for the holidays that lived such a great life. TD, as I came to name him (an abbreviation for his destiny) was a gentlemen to the end.

Alas, it didn't pan out. The turkey I raised won't be adorning my family's Thanksgiving table (there was some discomfort from some family members about eating someone they knew, and my offer was respectfully declined) but I did get to trade the 26-pound bird for an hour of private herding lessons with a sheepdog trainer. So TD not only helped teach me about raising a healthy meat bird, but in his own way taught me how to work with a border collie on a small herd of sheep. Which in my book is a hell of a trade, and that's a lot more than most people are getting from the Butterballs in their grocers’ freezer.

Jenna Woginrich  is the author of the forthcoming book, Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life, from Storey Publishing. Want to hear more about Jenna's turkey? You can visit her blog at Cold Antler Farm or hear her talking turkey on NPR's Morning Edition here.

Last year, the organic turkey I was supposed to pick up at my local health food store the Monday before Thanksgiving stood me up. The explanation had to do with a truck not making it from Pennsylvania, but whatever. There were no organic or pastured turkeys to be found within 100 miles.

Don't let this happen to you! Supplies of the best quality birds are already selling out, so if you plan to buy one at the store, do it soon. Or maybe you'll have luck finding one through a local producer (search by ZIP code at Local Harvest). If you live out in the country, call around. Most folks who keep small flocks grow a few extra birds in addition to those ordered by customers in spring. Others keep a waiting list for cancelled orders.

In Wisconsin, Good Earth Farm, a 5-farm cooperative that raised 750 pastured turkeys this year, expects them all to be sold before Thanksgiving week. Good Earth sells their turkeys throughout Wisconsin in health food stores, and throughout North America with their mail order business. Good Earth's Mike Hansen says that in addition to turkeys, he sees many more customers adding other pastured meats to their Thanksgiving orders.

With feed prices rising from $325 to $900 a ton this year, and turkeys being sensitive, somewhat goofy animals to handle, turkey should not be cheap. Right now, frozen organic turkeys from Whole Foods and similar chains range from $1.99 per pound doorbuster specials to more typical $3.49 per pound pricing.

Reminder: this is factory-farmed albeit "organic" poultry, which is not necessarily pastured. These animals were fed organic food, but were probably raised in tight quarters with very limited exposure to fresh air and sunshine. In comparison, pastured turkeys are allowed to move about freely outdoors during the day and confined at night. Whether or not the turkeys eat organic feed is up to the grower.   

This year, local small-farm prices range from $2.50 to $5 per pound for pastured birds (that's cleaned, in-the-bag weight). You get the lowest prices by picking up at the farm on a specified day (bring your cooler). Heritage breeds cost more, as do turkeys kept frozen until you're ready to bring them home.

This year I am rich in turkey, thanks to the three birds that were running around the turkey yard of Larry and Debby Bright on the morning of October 25, and in my freezer by sundown. And while I'm happy to have primo turkey, there is an important benefit if you opt for a meatless Thanksgiving dinner — that second piece of pumpkin pie.