It's Turkey Eating Time

I tend to overlook turkey as a viable dietary option. For whatever reason, other than during Thanksgiving season, I never eat turkey. I don’t dislike turkey; I love turkey legs, and I really enjoy making a mish mash of my mom’s leftover turkey and gravy from our holiday meal, but I never seem to find myself eating turkey other than at Thanksgiving time.

Luckily for me, a couple of friends (unknowingly) have led me back to turkey land. Last week one friend invited me over for dinner and cooked a delicious pasta dish with turkey meatballs made from DiPaolo’s turkey in the Greenmarket. Then, I was having dinner with a friend on Friday who told me she had a turkey craving. I took these two occasions as a sign that I should buy, cook and eat some turkey.

On my next trip to the farmers market, I made sure to seek out the DiPaolo’s stand. If you’ve ever been to the greenmarket you probably know them as the stand that always has something delicious smelling on the grill. You then probably notice that it’s a turkey stand and pass it by, something I have done many a time (big mistake.) This past Saturday I finally decided to buy some turkey sausage to make meatballs for Sunday dinner and subsequent workday lunches. I really enjoy the strong, fennel-y flavor of the turkey sausage and appreciate the fact that the DiPaolo’s people season their ground turkey so well that I don’t really have to do anything to it to make it good.

Here I serve turkey meatballs with tomato chutney stuffed squash blossoms and a pistachio pesto (I made the smear more to be funny that for appearance.) For lunch, I’ve been eating the meatballs over roasted corn with nut free pesto, (can’t be brining nuts to school with all the allergic children these days) heirloom tomatoes, and wild Italian arugula.I find that the strong taste of the turkey goes incredibly well with pesto, something that can often overwhelm other flavors.

While these dishes might sound, and perhaps even look good, the fact of the matter is that you can’t really go wrong with DiPaolo’s turkey. Buy it at your local greenmarket today!!!!!