Topinambur and Turkey sex

No, don't let the title mislead you, this will not be a poultry porn post featuring certain knobbly roots...just I had planned the whole post this week around my newfound love for Jerusalem Artichokes (topinambur), (and that will come in following paragraphs), but the noble veg was bumped off the priority register by a fresh a miracle that happened only yesterday...

The turkeys had SEX!  and again today!  And maybe again tomorrow!  And for about a week now, we have been getting one turkey egg per day...that means that one of the turkey hens is laying, and one of them is getting laid.... Not sure if they are the same hen, (because only one of the hens has submitted so far) but just in case, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter have all three earned a stay of execution.  If we can get them to reproduce, they will be worth feeding over the winter, and we will be able to produce our own turkeys year round instead of buying the chicks (turkey chicks cost about 10 euros each!)

According to Barbara Kingsolver (in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle") turkey sex is supremely rare.  I think that may be just american turkeys, but nonetheless, even here the norm is for artificial insemination and mechanical incubation, which means the animals themselves just don't know how to 'do it'.  The big heavy meat birds actually physically can't do it, but our second round of turkeys are a local rustic breed and they seem to be managing just fine.  In fact so long as Natalina, the original turkey hen (a commercial meat hybrid) was around, nothing was happening.  She was too big for the cock and she didn't make eggs, even though she was 3 months older than the other hens.  Now Natalina is in the freezer, and they're getting jiggy every day!  Takes them about an hour too, to get it all over and done with, from dancing and displays to the actual deed.  Funny in comparison with the rooster, who takes never more than 2 seconds...hop on, hop off, hop on, hop off (karate kid cock!)   The video below Gab took to show to some geese experts, trying to figure out if our geese are boys or girls (more poultry sex, hmmm), but there are some nice shots of the turkey cock in the background showing off his stuff...



So now for the originally planned post -- Jerusalem artichokes are THE MOST AWESOME VEGETABLE ever!  We started harvesting them last week, and I started researching what they are and what to do with them...OK, a vegetable that

1) Grows all by itself, in just about every climate, produces up to 5kg of edible root per plant with no work at all, and the biggest challenge is keeping it to its appointed space because it will take over if you let it (now I know what it looks like, I see it wild everywhere)
2) is the highest vegetable source of iron known, and is also full of other essential vitamins an minerals
3) tastes more or less like potatoes, and is filling like a carb, can be roasted, mashed, fried, but also eaten raw and yet has a fraction of the calories of potatoes and other carbs.
4) has been implicated in prevention of diabetes, and directed towards even a cure -- it is a carb, but its sugar is in fructose and Inulin instead of starch, and humans can't digest inulin -- so you get carb satisfaction without any impact on blood sugar and without carb calories.  In fact, it also makes a lovely flour when dried and ground (made bread with it this week, delicious!)
5) IS DELICIOUS

What more can you ask for???  I just love delicious calories that come naturally and wildly, without too much intervention, and the Jerusalem artichoke is just that.  Its actually not an artichoke, and has nothing to do with Jerusalem -- its a type of sunflower, (girasole, and 'jerusalem' comes from that)  and you eat the roots.  Peeled, they can be eaten in any way you eat potatoes.  Long term and winter storage is best just in the ground, dig 'em up when you want to eat them, and they live right through the deepest freeze, so those you don't dig up make next year's crop.  For the deep freeze of winter, they can keep in boxes of damp sand in the cellar, or I read of one gardener that put them in buckets of mud by the back door -- still freezes, but easy to get through.

One warning though...all that undigestible inulin makes for some pretty world class farting!  So add to my list of positives about this veg 6) keeps you entertained for hours with family fart-offs! ("pull my finger Nina!") But don't eat lots before a long road trip...!