Recipes and Reviews

With the extra days at home because of the weather this winter I went through all of my stock bones and vegetable scraps in the freezer and made almost three gallons of turducken stock. I just combined all of the bird bones from the last few months into my biggest stock pot and let it cook down.

One gallon of stock was frozen into quart containers, a half gallon was frozen into one and two cup containers, and the rest was used to make four soups: broccoli, butternut squash, cauliflour, and turkey bean.

The house is nice and warm and smells really good right now and I have plenty of soups for lunches and dinners for a while. I just will not be able to empty out the chest freezer this month like I had originally planned.

According to the weather guessers we will be getting our first snow this weekend with temperatures down to 9F on Tuesday night. So I figured it was time to start warming up ourselves and the kitchen a bit with some turkey stock and curry pumpkin soup.

I added a dozen whole cloves, a half-dozen allspice berries, and three whole chipotle chiles to the turkey stock recipe. I will be using this turkey stock, some roasted sugar pumpkins, and a small batch of applesauce in the curry pumpkin soup.

I did it again. I waited too long to put in an order with one of the local heritage turkey farms. Even though more farms are raising more turkey this year than they have in the last half century, demand as far outstripped supply.

This time, I'm putting my name in right now for next year's bird.

Ever since Laurie and I got together, Thanksgiving is our holiday. Our parents can lay claim to Easter and Christmas, but Thanksgiving is for us. The tradition is to either go backpacking or car camping out to the coast, which makes it hard to get very fancy with the cooking, so we cook everything ahead of time and heat it up in a skillet when we get there.