NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I had T. rex for Thanksgiving dinner. Of course, it wasn’t actually a Tyrannosaurus rex. But our turkey was as big as a dinosaur, so we dubbed him Turkey rex.

This magnificent beast came from Rainbow Ranch Farms. I had tried to order one of Xenia Stavrinides’ delicious, naturally raised, heritage breed turkeys online in late October, but she was sold out. Fortunately, she had reserved a few for return customers who procrastinate. Even more fortunately, we were included in that special category.

I opted for the Farm Choice bird. For $125, we got whatever weight and breed bird was available. The minimum weight was 15 pounds and that was the size that we were expecting.

The one Xenia selected for us weighed 28 pounds. I didn’t know that turkeys got that big. The breed is known as Standard Bronze. It’s a heritage breed, rarely raised anymore. Xenia said they seldom top 18 pounds. But because of global climate change, this summer has gone on endlessly. The turkeys just kept eating and eating right through fall. This year, they didn’t have to waste a lot of calories staying warm. That’s how we ended up with T. rex.

It was so big, we had to take out a shelf in order to get it into the refrigerator. We normally use a stainless steel roasting pan because it saves on waste at the landfill to use a reusable pan. I asked Vic to put the bird into our turkey roaster. It didn’t fit. This turkey had thighs bigger than Jennifer Lopez’. I bought the largest disposable roasting pan that I could find.

The next problem was calculating how long it should roast. Heritage breed turkeys are leaner than the broad-breasted whites that are found in grocery stores, with a greater proportion of thigh meat to breast meat. They cook differently. I found all kinds of conflicting cooking instructions on the Internet for heritage turkeys. We finally settled on 25 minutes a pound at 325 degrees. Turns out that’s wrong, but I’ll come back to that. I didn’t want to get up at 4 a.m. to put the bird in the oven, so we began preparing it at midnight. I say we, because I was incapable of lifting the thing by myself. Vic had to help manhandle it.

I mixed butter, minced sage, crushed garlic and a bit of maple syrup together, and stuffed it under the skin using a spatula. I put a quartered onion and a couple of stalks of celery in the body cavity, then slathered the bird with olive oil and put on a loose cap of aluminum foil. Vic took a shelf out of the oven and put the bird on the bottom shelf. I added two cups of turkey broth and a cup of Orfila Vineyards white Riesling wine to the pan. We went to bed, expecting the turkey to be done around 11 a.m.

I’m not a morning person. When I finally woke up at 9 a.m., the turkey was perfectly done to a rich golden brown. It seems that 20 minutes a pound at 325 degrees is the right formula to use, not 25 minutes a pound. We turned off the oven and left the bird to sit in its own juices. And what juices! We had a gallon of the most magnificent, rich, golden drippings that you could imagine.

Scott, Nicole and the twins arrived mid-morning. We noshed on appetizers while the twins ran in circles throughout the house, strewing teddy bears everywhere. After the girls went down for their afternoon nap, we served dinner. We had mashed potatoes made from heirloom King Edward potatoes from farmer’s market. I made cranberry sauce using orange peel, cinnamon sticks, cloves, and some Sangiovese wine from Orfila Vineyards. The Brussels sprouts had roasted chestnuts and chopped bacon with them, with a hint of lemon. The green salad came entirely from our garden, with two kinds of lettuce: Japanese mustard greens and arugula. I made a loaf of homemade challah bread, but the stuffing was Mrs. Cubbison’s with organic butter, onions, celery and drippings from the turkey. Vic made the gravy.

We had good discussions, terrific food and great wine. Scott and Nicole brought a bottle of Laetitia 2005 Pinot Noir that was so good it was all I could do to keep from licking the inside of the bottle. We concluded the meal with a pumpkin pie made from a white pumpkin that I had picked up on an October outing to The Pinery’s pumpkin patch in Escondido with Nicole and the twins.

But back to T. rex. Since Thanksgiving, we’ve had many a turkey sandwich. We’ve turned the bones to soup, two gallons of it, and frozen most of it. The heaviness of those bones was amazing. In contrast to broad-breasted whites, slow-raised heritage turkeys have bones that are strong enough to support their weight. And as for the taste of this turkey, it was superb.

The original T. rex might also have tasted great if any humans had been around 65 million years ago to cook one. Those dinosaurs might have tasted like chicken. In the journal Science this past April 13, scientists announced they had analyzed protein fragments from T. rex tissue. After demineralizing the bone, they were able to test the remaining material with antibodies to collagen, the main connective tissue that is found in bones of all animals. The material reacted with antibodies to chicken collagen. When the scientists analyzed fragments of protein from the bone, they found that the material resembled chicken collagen more than collagen from newts or frogs (both amphibians) and much more than collagen from mammals. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any reptilian collagen for comparison.

Combine these new findings with other evidence that sauropod dinosaurs such as T. rex, oviraptors and velociraptors laid eggs in nests, cared for their young, had feathers, and were warm-blooded. The evidence is getting stronger and stronger that modern birds evolved from early dinosaurs. Some ornithologists even say that birds are living dinosaurs. We just ate one of them.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].