Give Your Hound Dog Something to Celebrate on Thanksgiving.

Everybody should celebrate on Thanksgiving including your faithful hound. Here's a neat trick for giving your dog a happy Turkey Day and for getting rid of all those horrible bits and pieces of turkey and those giblets you never use.

First you need a Kitchen-Aid Mixer with the box of attachments. This is essential equipment for any kitchen and a lot of people have all they need for this project in a box shoved in the back of their cabinet that they never use. Drag it out. It looks like this:

Your attachment box may not be as torn up as my box, but it looks like this inside:

This link covers assembling and disassembling the grinder mechanism. Reverse it when your done to clean it out. It's all pretty simple to put together.

Step 1:  Assemble the grinder mechanism as shown in the pictures below. Once you've picked the bones of your turkey and put aside the meat you want to keep, gather up the scraps and bits and pieces, the skin and other edible parts your dog may enjoy. Remember it doesn't have to look tasty to you. It's going to be ground up and unrecognizable.

Step 2: Place a bowl under the grinder outlet to collect the ground turkey. Then just start feeding the

turkey scraps and giblets into the hopper. The corkscrew mechanism inside will force the meat forward past the chopping blades and out through the holes in the front. Just catch it as it comes out. Just make sure not to feed bones into the mechanism. It might simply grind up smaller bones and cartiladge for extra calcium. Your dog can eat it without harm. Might even do her some good.

Step 3: Finish grinding up all the meet and stuff, then take the grinder apart and clean it out good.

Step 4: Bag up the ground turkey in small sandwich sized bags or any size zippered freezer bag you've got.

Step 5: Freeze the bags of turkey. You might want to mark them for the dog, although it probably won't hurt you if you make turkey burgers out of it. It's likely you've eaten worse in turkey franks from the store.

Preparation:  Just take the bags out of the freezer and heat in the microwave for a minute or two. It's already cooked so you don't have to worry about cooking it. I mix it with dry dogfood and the dog loves it.

Note: If you have lots of turkey left, you can run the good bits through the grinder and make turkey burger out of it. Season it and stuff it into sausage casings you can buy at kitchen supply stores and you've got homemade sausages and weiners.

The beauty of doing this is how fast it clears off turkey leftovers and puts them into a convenient storable form that you don't have to worry about going bad or drying out on you. 

© 2014 by Tom King