Friday, November 25, 2011

Post Thanksgiving Turkey Stock

No photos today. My new lens should arrive on Monday. I have now learned that my purse is not a camera bag and that my purse likes to tip over when placed on a bench. We decided to replace the lens with a more powerful non-name brand lens. Let's hope we didn't make a mistake.

Thanksgiving was yesterday. It was stressful to prepare for but was well executed and generally fun. I cannot convey how happy I was that the weather was warm enough for the gaggle of young boys to play outside in the backyard. Of course, playing in the back yard turned into playing in the wetlands and then we had a bunch of muddy clothes and none too happy parents. Oopsie. Good thing we got the parents all relaxed on wine (and lots of it)

We made 2 turkeys. We deep fried a 13lbs bird and then roasted a 20lbs bird. The deep fry bird went rather smoothly. I think what time you save in roasting, you make up in prep work, but it frees up an oven. The roasted bird turned out to be beautiful, but we'll never cook a bird that big again. By the time the innermost meat was done, the outer meat was dry. No one complained, but we knew we could do better.

After everything was finished, the tables cleared and the girls were in their bath, we made turkey stock. We picked most of the meat off the bones and threw the bones, 2 quartered onions, some carrots, celery and herbs into our big stock pot with enough water to cover. We then let it boil down for hours and hours. After it had reduced by half we removed the solids and strained the remaining liquid through a cheesecloth. We were left with about 2 liters of stock. This morning we removed the half inch of fat from the stock and fed it to the dogs. We then took the cooled solids and removed all the bones. My husband then put everything through the meat grinder along with some leftover stuffing (The stuff that had burned to the pan) and made dog food. We've taken next to nothing out to the garbage, just some bones.

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