Each month is gay,
each season nice,
when eating
chicken soup
with rice.
– Maurice Sendak
Actually it was turkey, but Maurice didn’t write about turkey soup with rice in A Book of Months.
Once my chunky turkey stock was bubbling on the stove I discovered I had already used all the carrots and celery over the weekend, and so I added a chopped sweet potato instead, then threw in a bag of cooked brown and wild rice from the freezer. (Cooking noodles or rice separately keeps all the starch from coming out into your soup.) It was good, but left sufficient room for chocolate fondue at The Mercury later on at my Artemis Foundation meeting.
Turkey/Chicken Stock 101 (Coles’ Notes)
for a richer flavour and colour, roast your stripped turkey carcass in the oven until browned
onion skins and celery leaves make a great stock – throw an unpeeled quartered onion (or just the trimmings left over from the stuffing) and the inside stalks of celery that tend to get thrown out into your pot with the carcass
cover the carcass with cool water and bring the whole thing to a boil; let it simmer for about 20 minutes and then turn the heat off and let it cool, steeping as it does – there is no need to boil it for hours
once cool enough to handle, pull out the bones and strip off any remaining meat into the stock; chill
don’t be freaked out when it turns into gel; how do you think they make gelatin anyway?
any fat can be plucked off the top once it has risen and solidified in the fridge
if you freeze it in glass jars, make sure you leave plenty of room for expansion so that the glass doesn’t break (this may seem obvious, but I’ve done it myself far too many times)
Also, if you have some of the guts from the chicken or turkey, those could be tossed in for a while too, especially if they were roasted along with the bird to begin with.
If you do get some fat scraped off the top, you can save it to make soap if you are the industrious, crafty type 🙂
Turkey soap?
Now there’s a good holiday gift…