A Turkey in Every Pot

It's that special time again. Time to make more turkey stock. Goody! Stock therapy for me.

I picked up a package of turkey legs at the store and made sure that I had enough of my aromatics on hand to make another batch of stock.

Here I have carrots, onion, celery (with the leaves), garlic, black peppercorns, fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, fresh oregano, fresh parsley and fresh bay leaves. I later added a couple of dried grape tomatoes and a few pieces of diced fresh tomato to the stock pot.

The first step was to clean and roughly chop the veggies and put those in an oven-safe pan along with the turkey legs.

These roasted in a 375 degree oven for about 50 minutes.

Then the ingredients were placed in the stock pot with some water and the remaining herbs.

More water was poured into the roasting dish and the pan was deglazed, releasing all of the wonderful fond from the bottom of the pan.

After about 8 hours, the stock had reduced down to 2 quarts.

The next morning I took the cooled stock out of the refrigerator, skimmed the fat off the top and ladled the gelatinous goodness into several 1-cup containers. After labeling the containers, they were lovingly placed in the freezer for later use.

But that's not all. After allowing the stock to simmer gently for a couple of hours, I removed some of the meat (which had fallen off the bone) from the stock. I let that cool in the refrigerator before continuing to the next step.

I decided to make turkey salad with some of the meat. I carefully picked through the meat before adding finely diced carrot, celery and white onion. Then I mixed in some mayonnaise and some of our delicious veggie dip until the mixture met with my approval.

The turkey salad is nice and creamy.

And now we have lunch. Delightful. The horseradish in the veggie dip added a bit of a tang to the turkey salad while the veggies lent a nice crunch to the salad.