Quote Originally Posted by Bikingmomof3 View Post
Share the story, please?
Well we live in the country here, and there are still lots of dairy farms and wildlife around. Plenty of big snapping turtles that love the farm ponds, and they migrate around from pond to pond looking for mates and new places to lay eggs.
My girlfriend had a pond, as did I (before I sold that house) and once a HUGE snapping turtle moved into her pond. It's shell was about a foot and a half long. My friend kept ducks, and I did too, and big snappers are bad news for ducks. Anyway, her husband shot the turtle and they decided to make turtle soup for some guests who were coming the next day for lunch.
My friend read a few turtle soup recipes and proceeded to butcher and clean the meat from the turtle. She later said she would never do it again, because it was so much messy yucky work for so little meat. But she is tough. Anyway, she finally got all the meat cleaned and cut into cubes and she put a little marinade on it and put it in a bowl in the fridge overnight to make the soup with the next day. They cleaned the giant shell, which they actually used that Halloween for their toddler's costume as Mutant Ninja Turtle, with the top half of the shell strapped on his back.
So...the next morning my friend took the bowl of cubed turtle meat out of the fridge in order to make the soup. To her horror, she saw that the meat cubes were TWITCHING ABOUT in the bowl!!!! Apparently some sort of electrical residual energy, like the way frogs legs can twitch after death. She said it was really really GROSS. But by that time she had all the other ingredients ready to go and so she just dumped the meat into the hot soup and that was that. The soup turned out delicious and her guests were mighty impressed. Her son had a tiny 1" baby snapper he had found the day before, and they put it in a pretty Japanese bowl to swim about on the dining table as a centerpiece while they had the soup (they later let the baby go free).

I have my own giant snapper stories and experiences as well (i'm known as the snapper wrassler around here), but I never had the urge to cook one.