I don’t eat meat (ok, realistically, what with eating the kids leftovers on occasion, I’m probably like 96% vegetarian), but my family does, and since I can’t stomach large scale commercial farming, I buy meat for them from the folks at our local farmers market, with preference to the folks trying to raise animals in a sustainable way.

On Saturday, as we were buying our chicken and eggs, our poultry farmer mentioned that he had some bags of turkey wings that he was giving away if we wanted one. He suggested making soup, and since I’d been thinking about stock since his similar offer of chicken backs the week before, I jumped at the chance.

And though it was a decent amount of work to braise the wings, remove the meat, and then simmer the pot for 4 hours, the vat of stock that’s sitting in my fridge was well worth it.

making stockEven more than that, I was totally overwhelmed at the amount of meat I got off the turkey wings. All told, I probably pulled about 4 cups of meat off the wings - plenty for turkey salad or something similar for the carnivorous family member lunches this week. The fact that the wings were free says something not so nice about our relationship to the animals we eat and how we want them delivered to us. Just something to think about.