The Tortoise and The Hare

Slow but steady did not win their race this day!

We all have heard the story about the tortoise and the hare and how the turtle was slow but steady and won the race. Neither one was very lucky the day my dad caught this turtle and rabbit.

While visiting my sister a couple of weeks ago, she found a couple of bags of turtle in the freezer that she had gotten from our dad’s last year. So, we decided to have fried turtle. If you didn’t know it already, turtle has 7 kinds of meat. These are the seven types that I came up with from researching turtle meat — turkey, fish, poultry, veal, pork, duck, mutton. After thawing the turtle she found that my dad had frozen a rabbit in with the turtle. Maybe that was my dad’s way of giving us one last laugh when we thought about him catching turtles on his fishing lines he put out everyday.

When my dad retired, he and my mother moved to Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. I remember over the years when I would call him, I would always ask “What did you catch today?” And it never failed that he would say “well, I caught a couple of turtles on my lines today”. Funny, he would stake his poles out and then from the house he would use binoculars to watch the poles to see if he had caught anything.

You can see the different colors of the turtle meat. The darker meat was almost gizzard like (my favorite chicken piece).

Rabbit soaking in milk.

My sister soaked both the turtle and the rabbit in milk for the afternoon and then she breaded it and fried it, made biscuits, mashed potatoes with milk gravy and home made green beans and then we topped it off with some homemade coffee ice cream. The turtle was delicious (I didn’t get around to trying the rabbit) and even though I don’t have a recipe for you for the tortoise and the hare, I just wanted you to see what we feasted on one night while visiting in Braggadocio, Missouri.