Turkey Soup

Given that we decided to experiment a bit this year with our side dishes, desserts, and even how we made the turkey for Thanksgiving, I decided to try to be additionally adventurous as the kitchen was being cleaned.

My mom has long made soups from what seems like just about any meat left on a bone. Ham soup, chicken soup, turkey soup, whatever.

I’d recently read or heard (can’t remember where) that the start to making turkey soup is simply to leave the turkey carcass in water and boil it for a few hours to make stock.

Since my mom was here for dinner, I asked for some first hand instructions.

First thing she told me was to not clean out the pan that we used for gravy. So once we emptied out the leftover gravy, without wiping it down, I put the turkey bones back in and filled it with water.

We started boiling it down and I was surprised that after a short while , the meat that was left on the bones just started to fall right off.

After a couple of hours, it only took about 15 minutes to pick off the remaining bones and I could have stopped there and still had a great turkey soup.

But while we made the turkey, we also cooked a ton of carrots, turnips, and onions all around and under the turkey, and then ran all those vegetables through a food processor to make a really tasty paste that sort of looked like baby food. Some of that went into the gravy, but the rest I poured into the broth.

Lastly, I chopped up four carrots, three stalks of celery, and a big ol’ potato and dropped them into the broth.

I’m not a big soup fan, but this is looking really good to me.

The only problem is I’m afraid it’ll make so much that we’ll be eating turkey soup for months!

I think I’ll be taking over some plentiful helpings of soup to my parents and Jennifer’s folks tomorrow!