After Thanksgiving

As you can imagine from reading my previous post, I had tons of leftovers after Thanksgiving. So, I didn't cook for almost a week except for making a pot of turkey noodle soup (Steve's suggestion). This was more work than it sounds like.

It actually started on Thursday, with Steve expertly removing most of the flesh from the carcass with the handy dandy electric carving knife.

Next, I set the carcass in the new big crock pot (go office freecycle table!) with 8 cups of water and simmered it on low for about a day and a half - Thursday evening to Saturday lunch.

Obviously, there was no need to cook on Friday - leftovers out the proverbial wazoo.

Saturday I chopped up 3-4 cups of the remaining dark meat and added that to a soup pot already containing two sauteed carrots, one sauteed onion and some garlic. Then I strained the contents of the crock pot (with a great big mesh splatter guard) into the soup pot and added orzo pasta and a little salt and pepper. A few minutes before serving, I stirred in about half a cup of chopped fresh parsley from the backyard.

This was really tasty, but I wonder now if I should have skimmed off the fat from the soup, because the leftovers were kinda gelatinous and weird. With the first leftover helping, I added water because it appeared to need it. Fail - way too thin. The next couple of times I reheated it, I put it in the microwave just like it was and let the fat melt down on its own. It really warmed us up!

Since then, all I've really done is cook up the remaining bunch of kale and some lentils. Thursday night's dinner was a replay of the tuna bacon spinach pasta that used up another big bag of fresh spinach. We had to substitute capicola because Publix hasn't had the pancetta in a while; apparently, their supplier hasn't either. Maybe I'll have to start walking across the parking lot to the Fresh Market?