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Old May 11th, 2015 #383
Alex Linder
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ASTRONAUT'S FAVORITE DISH: UNENDANGERED (NON-ALLIGATOR) SNAPPING TURTLE CHOWDER

Next to a Mason jar full of delicious Tang, or a loamy bedful of 17-year-old pussy, there is nothing 'nots love more than the delicious feast below. Why? Because their job is so easy they have time to glomp around Fla and Ala and interact with the natives, many of whom are turtles. So over time, NASA developed a whole turtle-eating culture that is actually LESS known than their proud literal NAZI intellectual-scientific provenance. So...

I made turtle chowder with about 1' pounds of common snapping turtle meat instead of clams. Came out very nice. First time ever rendered or ate a turtle. The meat takes a long time to loosen up, I boiled it for 2 hours before throwing it in chowder pot. The turtle was maybe 15 pounds, off which you could probably get 3 lb of meat, max, I'd guess. I was not good at cleaning it, as first time, but managed about 2 lb to 1.5 lb. Pretty rough work. Chopping the head off that bastard with a rusty hatchet was not easily accomplished.

Key to making chowder:

1) fuck the bullshit you read about cream, which has more subdivisions than boxing. All you need is a gallon of milk. why pay $4 for 1/4 as much. you can use any milk product you have on hand but if you must buy, just get regular milk, 2% or whole
2) don't overboil potatoes or they mush out quickly in chowder. light-boil, set aside.
3) i threw in the rest of the wild turkey already cooked on hand
4) boil the turtle meat for 2 hours (we tried to deep fry turtle, big FAIL) then rip it into tiny shreds with fingers. it is more or less like clams in texture. does NOT taste fishy/swampy as you'd expect. but remains tough and. turtle meat is different types of meat all called turtle, some is like bass (white), most is shades of pink/red. some say 7 types of meat on a turtle.
5) you could also make a soup out of turtle easily enough
6) cut up mini-carrots really small or they might stay rocklike, those withy little bastards can take a lot of hot-water abuse and keep their shape
7) potatoes, one pack of bacon, one can corn, wild turkey, turtle. i strongly disagree with bacon in chili (as are chocolate, beer, other ingreds.), waste of money but NOT so in chowder, you need bacon, it adds a lot
8) use lot of potatoes, i used about 8. actually too many hence overflow pan.

In the end, turtle is some effort for not really great but certainly not bad amount of meat. Just not sure how you can handle turtle other than boiling the hell out of it, you surely can't deep fry it - proving the adage that you can deep-fry anything a great big fat LIE.
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Last edited by Alex Linder; May 11th, 2015 at 07:43 PM.