Let’s Talk Turkey: Choosing Your Holiday Bird
November 17, 2010 by Tania
Filed under Food & Nutrition, Holidays, Savvy Living Guide
Thanksgiving is around the corner and plans are in the works for your holiday meal. A meal that will most likely center around a turkey.
Do you always wonder how big the turkey needs to be? CLICK HERE to use this convenient tool to calculate the amount of Turkey, Stuffing and Gravy you need to make for your gathering. It allows you to specify adults, children, and eating style!
Image Courtesy of Tuchodi
Many supermarkets offer free turkeys as a holiday promotion. I now splurge and buy a free range organic turkey for our Thanksgiving Meal. It’s a couple of times a year so I feel it’s worth spending a little extra to know how it grew and what it ate.
Like most areas of grocery shopping these day, consumers have many choices. Within each type of turkey – you may want to learn about the individual farm that raised your turkey. Each farm has their own set of standards.
Kosher – Kosher Turkeys are blessed by a Rabbi, they will be rinsed and salted, cleaned with fresh water. The Kosher process tends to be a more time consuming way of processing meat and the process will typically produce a higher quality product.
Brined – Brined Turkey is prepared in a salted solution. I’ve never purchased a brined turkey, but I’ve had good results brining a turkey and it was delicious.
Free Range – Free range is a bit of a nebulous term due to the fact that the USDA only requires the animal have access to the outdoors, due to this it can pay to learn a little bit more about the actual farm raising the turkey to ensure the turkey you are buying has actually roamed the range free.
Certified Organic – Certified Oraganic Turkeys should be truly free range, humanely raised with plenty of room to roam, with access to fresh water. They should be fed an all vegetarian organic diet without GMO. They should be raised free of antibiotics, growth stimulants, or chemical fertilizers.
Conventional – Convential Turkeys are raised in a confined space, about 1/4 of that of a free range turkey, will be given growth stimulants that will cause them to mature significantly faster than it would on it’s own.
What’s It Going To Cost Me:
We did a little shopping around to find out what prices are in the marketplace, this should give you an idea of what you can expect to pay.
Whole Foods:
Mary’s Certified Organic – ate an organic diet $3.69 per pound.
Mary’s Natural Free Range $2.29 per pound.
Diestel Free Range $2.69 per pound.
Heidi’s Organic $3.99 per pound.
Delivered:
Check out Local Harvest to find local Turkey Farms. Prices range from $59 – $150+.
Spud Delivery also offers Turkeys with their organic grocery delivery service.
Organic Turkey’s $4.49 per pound.
Free Range Turkey’s for $3.22 per pound (Delivered to your door!).Spud has extended the following offer to PND readers – use code PureNaturalDiva in the promo code field to get $25 off your first 4 orders with Spud ($6.25 will be taken off each order). Delivery with Spud is free with a minimum order (in LA $32).
Spud delivers to: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, & in Western Canada, Vancouver, Vancouver Island & Calgary.
The Farmer’s Market!
If you are lucky enough to have a farmer’s market with a poultry vendor, chances are good that they will offer turkeys. Our local vendor was pre-ordering for $3.99 per pound.
Hopefully this gives you more information for your turkey shopping this Thanksgiving.
Better Bacon: Simple Food Solution
September 14, 2010 by Tania
Filed under Savvy Living Guide
Bacon… tastes so good and after watching this vlog… hopefully it will be a little bit less bad for you!
For further information about Sodium Nitrate – Read the Twinkie Report.
Better Bacon?
Drowning In Junk Mail
March 14, 2010 by Tania
Filed under Clean House, Green Living, Simple Solutions
Is You Mailbox Full Of Junk Mail?
We all get so much junk mail! It’s such a waste – ending up right directly in the recycling in our home.
How Many Trees Does It take to Produce Junk Mail
Did you know It takes 53 million trees to make the 19 billion catalogs that are sent every year?
Don’t despair – with a few simple steps stem the flow of junk mail to your mailbox and get OFF the dreaded mailing lists that are causing the flow.
It will take about 15 minutes to fill out a few online forms. These simple steps will reduce the paper invasion to your home and help stop junk mail!
Some of Our Junk Mail
When filling out the forms – Don’t forget to remove both yourself and your spouse or significant other.
Direct Marketing Association
The Direct Marketing Association will put your name on a “do not mail” list, which all its members must cross-reference before sending you a solicitation. This site represents marketers, so they will get you to jump through a hoop or two. In addition for companies that you have done business with, you will need to contact them directly.
If you are worried about missing special offers, you can always open an email account just for “junk mail”.
Another tip for special offers - google a vendor before completing a purchase – often you’ll find all there current special offers.
Consumer Credit Reporting Industry
The Consumer Credit Reporting Industry will remove your name from the mailing lists that credit card companies use to send out offers. You will have to provide your SS information, so I went to a few sites that I trusted before I was comfortable proceeding – you can’t be too careful.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com
Phone Books
If you aren’t using them – why receive them. They are bulking take up space and use a lot of paper.
This organization will contact all phone book companies in your area and remove you from their lists!
Or the number for individual companies using the following information:
AT&T 1-866-329-7118
Superpages 1-800-888-8448
Yellow book has made it easy – go to http://corporate.yellowbook.com/products/print-directory-options-opt-out/
When calling to cancel your phone book be sure to tell them they don’t need to call you annually to confirm you still don’t want the phone book! They actually said if they call and don’t reach you, they will resume regular delivery! But after a short conversation the representative was able to set it up so that we receive no phone calls and no phone books. Beautiful!
Online Bill Pay
You can also set up many of your bills to be paperless and to pay them online – if you’re worried about missing an important bill you can always set up an email account to be used exclusively for bills.
If there is a “Stop Junk Mail” resource we have missed, please let us know!
Tweet
