My Dog is Chelsea

Ah, the joys of dog ownership.

I received the following email this afternoon, from a friend who comes by to walk Calla every day:

Calla was a bit of a bad girl today…..When I arrived to walk her there was evidence of a hurricane that came through the kitchen…..she managed to get the freezer door open and pull out the ice cream and sorbet which landed and melted on the stove and floor. She somehow also managed to get the trash door open, and the bag out of the can. So there was a big swirl of carrot stems and sorbet marinating on the floor.

Awesome! My dog now knows how to open both the freezer AND the garbage! As if the cabinets full of dry goods weren’t enough.

But here’s the worst part:

Not long ago, I got it in my head that I would make a turkey for Thanksgiving. Now, mind you, I don’t eat much meat. Only recently have I started to incorporate local, sustainable, organic, non-CAFO meats into my diet, and in very infrequent portions. Up until Thanksgiving, I’d mainly relied on (trustworthy) restaurants for my animal and fish protein. It’s been about 6 years since a hunk of raw flesh entered my kitchen.

But I ordered my free-range bird from my local grocer. And I cooked it on Saturday (I had two Thanksgivings this year), and it was delicious (if a bit dry in certain spots, thanks to my paranoia about raw poultry and my complete inexperience with turkey-cooking). Anyway, last night I began making my mother’s famous Turkey Carcass Soup (which, it turns out, is a recipe of my equally famous Aunt Joanne) and the first step is, as the recipe’s name implies, to boil the turkey carcass for a few hours until you have a nice and tasty stock.

I tossed in some veggies—leek, onion, carrots, parsnip—and boiled the hell out of that turkey carcass last night. When it was done, I strained it and tossed the mushy vegetables and the carcass in the garbage. I made a mental note to take out the trash, because Calla’s noticeable intrigue with the presence of meat in the kitchen had not escaped me. But my forgetful brain immediately erased the mental note and when I left for work in the morning, the turkey carcass remained in the garbage.

Now let us return to the email I received:

So there was a big swirl of carrot stems and sorbet marinating on the floor.

See what I’m getting at here? Do you notice what item is rather ominously missing from that sentence? That’s right—Miss Calla-Do went ahead and had herself a mini Thanksgiving feast on the boiled turkey carcass.

Now, boiled poultry bones are pretty soft and I probably don’t need to be concerned about shattering, which is a problem with bones that have been simply cooked. But a problem arises when Calla’s belly, which is accustomed to eating highly-processed dog food pellets, begins to churn the carcass through the ol’ system.

Yeah. Gross. I rushed home from work early, so as to prevent any repeats of the last “Mom, I ate something I wasn’t supposed to and proceeded to poop all over the living room and then step in it and jump on the walls and the couch” episode, which, let me tell you, I will go to great lengths to avoid.

So. By now, I am sure, you understand the whole new meaning of “Turkey Carcass Soup.”

YUM!