The Goods Are Odd

We had banked on having leftovers for many days after attending two Thanksgiving dinners (the strategy in visiting different families) and doggie bags from restaurant trips over the weekend when no one felt like cooking. We forgot to factor in how quickly those leftovers would disappear when we had days of people over around lunch time. So the only goods found ourselves with come Monday were two halves of two different turkey carcasses and some gravy that ran out of something to be put on.

Yet again my Alice Waters cookbook came through on a lovely soup, rich enough to fill you up on those first December days and too rich to make more than once a year. The reason for the richness is obvious when soup cools sort of becomes a solid turkey fat jello mold…but just heat it up, forget what you saw, and it’s back to a lovely filling broth. (For that gravy I just roasted some potatoes I needed to use and just ate those in a bowl of gravy waiting for the stock to cook…it was pretty medieval feeling)

Since the carcasses had been really picked over, I didn’t have any meat to fill up the broth with so I went with two of her variations of a Turkey and Kale soup. I added a bit (1/8lb) of pancetta and some cups of cooked brown rice. Even though we have beautiful chard in the garden I decided to buy a bunch of kale since I think it holds up better for a soup we have been eating for three days already (I’d say one or two more to go). I kept the pieces big so they would slurp up like wide noodles.

The turkey bits cooked in 3 quarts of water with some vegetables and herbs for the standard stock time of about two hours. I never really count this cooking time since it doesn’t have to be dealt with. Then I just fried up the pancetta and added carrots, onion, and celery and sauteed that for a while until it was all tender enough for soup. The broth is then strained into the veggie pot, add the kale and the cooked rice.

(This picture is well before these were done, they cooked up into a lovely browned tender mess)

A note: Alice calls to parboil the kale which I find unnecessary. She lives here in the East Bay so I wish she took it upon herself to be a bit more water conscious on some of these techniques. If something asks me to use extra water I usually just figure out another way. We’ve only have two good rains since April or something. Deciding to just add the kale straight to the soup made me wonder if there are any low-water-use cookbooks out there, and if not there should be.

So, this is a great way to use all that Thursday bird, even if all the meat is gone. I would note to make sure no stuffing is attached, I ended up composting one back piece that had too much bread in it.