Jan 13 2009
One Bird Many Meals
Even if you are a single person, buying bulk is still a hot tip. Go ahead and pick up a well priced whole turkey! It’ll make you many, many meals with just a little planning.
Roast off the bird as you usually do. Let it cool enough to handle. Using a good knife and your fingers, take the two drumsticks off; pull the skin, remove the meat and put in a small freezer bag. Label, date and freeze it. Repeat with the thighs. You might want to dice up the thigh meat, depending on how you would use it. Now, carefully disjoint the wings (they are usually a little more difficult to get completely off). Again, remove the skin, pull the meat, set it aside. Next carefully take each entire breast off. I personally leave the skin on the breasts. Bag each breast up separately. Go over the carcass carefully, removing any larger bits of meat still there and add them to the pile of wing meat. Break the carcass through the spine—generally pull it apart so it’ll fit in your largest pot with the lid on. Cover with water; add the pan drippings. Set it to simmer while you chop up a couple onions and clean some garlic cloves. Pitch those in with the bones. Let it cook for a couple of hours. Sit a large colander in a large bowl and pour the whole pot into the colander. You can line the colander with a flour sack towel if you want fine, clear broth. That’s your soup base. You can freeze it off now, or proceed to make a nice soup for your supper that evening. Cup up your vegetables, get them cooking in the broth; once they’re nearly done you can portion the soup out and choose to freeze some of it if it’s made a great deal. What you leave out for your supper that night gets noodles or rice pitched in; don’t put the noodles or rice in what you are going to freeze, tho. Add in the pile of oddment meat from the wings and the carcass.
The leg and thigh meat you bagged to freeze are marvelous for creamed turkey on toast or pasta. One of my favorite things to do with it is to put a bag of mixed frozen vegetable in a pot to heat; mix up some turkey gravy; add a freezer bag of turkey meat diced up and serve over biscuits. Close enough to turkey pot pie for my mouth!
Do look into bulk cooking. Once a week or once a month cooking is a real time saver and really is easier than it might look before you wade in and do it. There is a lot of support out there for doing it, too!
I do this all the time with chicken, although I tend to eat it over 3-4 days rather than freeze the cooked meat. Leftovers from the first day’s roast dinner go in salads, curries, pies etc..
One thing confuses me in your post. You refer to ’serve over biscuits’. For this UK’er, a biscuit is something sweet you dunk in your tea!
What are you referring to, and could you give a link to an appropriate recipe? Thanks.