Saturday, November 27, 2010

turkey carcass, turkey stock

Thanksgiving, a turkey carcass got thrust at me, thrust at me in a plastic shopping bag.  I slunk home and shoved it in my fridge.  The first thing you need to ask yourself is: do I have a big enough pot?  Turkeys are big birds.  There was room enough in the cavity of mine for a Nerf football.  The second thing you need to ask yourself (and here you need to be very honest with yourself) is: how squeamish am I?  There was a lot of meat clinging to my carcass and getting at it would have been too laborious, rather, was too laborious until I buckled down and really dug in.  You cannot pussy-foot around a turkey carcass.  Clean a large area of your counter and plop that sucker down.  Tear it apart with your hands.  Your hands and one fork are the only tools you need to clean and dismember a turkey carcass.  

    
Once you've got that sucker sufficiently cleaned, i.e. picked through, go ahead and ram it into the biggest pot you have.  You'll notice that I didn't clean every last bit of meat off the carcass.  I could have, and that would have been good, but I could also have vacuumed the floor with a straw that I'd shoved a cotton ball into for a filter.  Very tedious.  Not all that necessary.  Anyway, once your turkey carcass is cleaned, it's easy to make the stock.  Just add some celery-carrot-onion (plus water) to the carcass, bring to a boil and reduce on a simmer.  When mine was done cooking, I put it out on the porch to cool.  The very best thing about winter is cooling stocks on the porch.  Turkey soup tomorrow.  Essence of rutabaga. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

---- I made almost every dish that Oil Changes suggested, and had a lot of fun. I thought I was healthy but found that a giant tape worm had been eating all the meals instead. The doctor down the street removed it from me, and dragged it out of my mouth, it was about eight feet long. This nurse had the hots for me but now she doesn't like me anymore. They called a garbage man to come and take it away. I guess it is a good lesson -- you think you're on to some great shit, but as usual someone is a step ahead of you. God I wish that didn't happen, and am currently trying to enter a new chapter....

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Scotty Dog said...

I finally recovered my blogspot ID and password, so I will no longer need to comment in an anonymous fashion. Got a 5.5 qt. dutch oven over thanksgiving weekend, baptized it with a turkey black bean soup.