Turkey Leftovers Soup

After Thanksgiving dinner there usually sits the carcass of a delicious turkey on the counter with some meat left on its bones.  What to do with this turkey?  Why not make some soup with it!  That is what someone suggested to me and that is what I did.  Why didn't I think of it before?!  There's no reason for all that juicy meat to go to waste.  Not to mention it's low budget and healthy!  

To start I opened that pantry to see what I had.  Bingo!  6 cartons of low sodium chicken broth.  You may think this is weird, but I enjoy making chicken noodle soup to take to work for lunch, so I usually grab a couple when they are BOGO at Publix.  I immediately put what was left of the turkey into a large 30-quart pot, poured the chicken broth in and turned it on high.  I put a tablespoon of pepper and poultry seasoning for some extra flavor.  Once it came to a boil I turned the heat down to medium low and let it boil for about 1.5 hours.

Next I dive into the fridge to see if I've got anything useful (I actually forgot to do this before starting to cook the soup).  Luckily I find some carrots (5), an onion and a couple sweet potatoes.  You can chop them up however you'd like.  There's never too many vegetables in a soup, so get adventurous.  The one thing I didn't have that I wanted was celery.  I'll have to save that for next time. 

After the turkey has been cooking in the broth for about an hour and a half I took it all out and put it into a baking dish.  I like to use this to separate the meat from the scraps.  I go through It piece by piece and discard all of the skin, bones and cartilage. This is usually when Zero (my dog) lucks out and gets a bowl of skin and fat to chow down on.  I was absolutely shocked when I saw how much turkey meat came off the bones!  Especially since I could barely pull any meat off before cooking it.

While separating the turkey meat I let the broth settle and cool a bit.  This makes it easy to skim the oil from the top and it only takes a couple of minutes.  It makes the soup a lot cleaner and definitely a bit healthier.  Now its time to taste the soup.  Since I only used chicken broth it was a bit strong and salty, so I put some water in it to level it out a little.  This also helps give more volume because the noodle will be soaking a lot of it in.

Before putting the carrots and onions in the soup I like to cook them down a little bit in a pan to help soften them up.  Here I added some more pepper, poultry seasoning and a little bit of garlic powder (garlic goes with everything, right?).  After it's cooked down a bit I put a cup of the broth in to deglaze all the good flavor off of the pan and then toss it all into the pot and bring it to a light boil. After about an hour more of cooking I put in the sweet potatoes since they don't take long to get soft.  Put the lid back on and let it cook for another hour or so.

At this point I would normally put a large bag of egg noodles in and let it cook.  However, since I was unprepared I decided to just cook the noodles as I go.  I put some soup into a smaller pot, brought it to a boil and put in some macaroni pasta that I had in the pantry.  Viola!  Grab a bowl, scoop some turkey and vegetables on top and you have a delicious bowl of Turkey Leftover Soup!!