I'm Industrious

I feel like I got a lot done this week, cooking wise. Tuesdays I stay home from work so I made a batch of bread and whipped up homemade banana pudding and chocolate pudding. I am out of bread flour so the bread was not amazing, it was a lot more dense than it is with the right flour. The pudding was good though. I have never made pudding completely from scratch. There are a plethora of recipes online, I just had to pick the one that seemed the easiest and that I had all the ingredients for. Grace had a sore throat so pudding seemed like a good idea. It was delicious! I thought I would tweak the banana recipe and make a batch of chocolate too. It was not good! Grace loved it though and ate some every day for the rest of the week. It turned out very runny and grainy, kind of like wet coco wheat cereal. Today I cooked up a turkey we had sitting around in the freezer. The soup kitchen at church is serving turkey soup this month and they need a bunch of turkey. It looked like the best time for me to experiment with turkey cooking when there was very little pressure for it to turn out great. Since it is going into a soup there is a pretty big margin for error. I got it ready as soon as I got up this morning, it seemed like the right thing to do. You always hear of people putting the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven early, early in the morning, like 4am. Per the package directions this turkey should take 2 1/2 to 3 hours. I cooked it for about three hours. I remember hearing somewhere that the little pop-up button that comes in the turkey is not a good indication of doneness so I left the bird in for a little while after it popped up. The turkey was okay, not the most flavorful I have ever had. I know that I could have probably put some seasonings on it or something, maybe next time. Because it was going into a soup I didn't try very hard to do a pretty carving job. I was also in a hurry so it is all in a messy pile in a container in the fridge. I am pretty excited about the stock I am making though. I use chicken stock as flavoring in a lot of things I make and thought it would be fun to make an attempt at turkey stock. Per my memory of a couple blogs I read on the subject and a few recipes I dug up online it is cooking away on the stove as I type. According to people that have done this before, all you have to do is dump the carcass in a pot, add cut up vegetables and spices, cover the whole thing with water and cook for several hours.

Mine has:

Turkey carcass (and, in the words of Grace: all the icky parts)

Unpeeled carrots, cut in large chunks.

Half a bunch of celery, including the leafy tops

Two onions cut in quarters, don't bother to take off the papery skin

Garlic salt

Whole peppercorns

Parsley flakes

Enough water to submerge the whole mess

The consensus of the recipes I read is that after straining out all the solids the liquid should be refrigerated overnight so all the fat comes to the top and can be removed easily. I'm excited to see how this turns out, I hope it is good!