Monday, December 10, 2007

Making Turkey Broth

Yesterday we had a lovely fellowship dinner with a like-minded church that joined with us for our services and annual harvest banquet. The ladies of our church put on a lovely meal, in the typical Thanksgiving dinner style (turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, salads, pie). The nifty thing was that they let me take home the carcasses from two of the turkeys that they roasted! So today I am making broth from the bones. I first roasted the bones themselves at 425 F until they got all sizzly, a bit golden, and slightly brittle. While those were roasting away, I chopped the other things for my broth flavor. I had had the job of chopping up three bags of celery for the stuffing on Sunday, so I had quite a lot of celery ends and middles leftover from that. I got out my lovely big stockpot and put a couple of chopped onions in with my celery ends. When the bones were lovely and roasted, I took them out of the oven and used a pair of pliers to break open the middles so that the good marrow inside could come out and flavor the broth, and then I added them to my onions and celery in the stockpot. I poured enough purified water over it all to cover by a couple of inches and set it to simmer on top of my stove. So now it is there steaming away...taking every bit of goodness and flavor from those wonderful turkey bones. I will have to decide how exactly I will use the good broth. Dumpling soup with dumplings made from the schmaltz that I collected from the gravy broth? Or little homemade cubes of broth concentrate (like Mama makes in her ice cube trays)? I will have to ponder this well. It is not often that I have such treasure about my kitchen!

1 comment:

Ana said...

Aww, how fun!!! I love what you put on your blog about working in the kitchen. It's so inspiring! Speaking of dumplings ... I made this wonderful chicken/veggie/dumpling soup for dinner. It was so wonderful. :) I'm sure there will be a post on my blog about it. :) Check it out! Try it, it was so yummy!!!