The *recipe* I used is very loosely based on Alton Brown’s Bird To The Last Drop, mostly in that I used Old Bay seasoning and thyme to season it, as he does.  But I didn’t have a turkey carcass, as I’d already used what bones I had for the slow-cooker stock.  I also prefer noodles to rice in my soups.

So basically, what I did was dump the stock into a large pot.  The stock was very highly concentrated to the point that it was thick and gelatinous.  I had cooked it down like that on purpose, to save space in the fridge/freezer.  After it was done cooking in the slow cooker, I strained it into a pot on the stove and boiled it down that way.

So naturally, I had to add water, enough to make about four quarts of broth.  Brought it to a boil and threw in a bag of egg noodles.  When the noodles were nearly cooked, in went the leftover green beans and a package of mixed frozen veggies, along with the Old Bay seasoning and thyme.  When it came back to a boil, in went the leftover diced turkey.  Bring back to a boil, and simmer until it’s all nice and hot.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  Nomnomnom…

Exact amounts are not important, use what you have.  The way I did it, it made a LOT.  But remember, NOTHING was wasted, not even the turkey breast bones.  And it’s good for the soul, especially on a rainy icky day like today…much better than medical treatments for depression!

Enjoy!

If you do pick one up used, it may or may not come with this booklet.  But I have a .pdf version of it, available for anyone who wants it to download.

I made this turkey recipe tonight.  It was excellent, but here are a few notes about it…

At least where I shop, a whole boneless turkey breast is hard to find.  I ended up buying a bone-in one, and boning it out myself.  It’s not that hard if you have a decent boning knife.  And then you end up with the bones, which of course should be used to make slow-cooker turkey stock.  You can then use this stock to make a soup from any leftover turkey, throwing in some rice or noodles, and some veggies (good ones are carrots, celery, green beans, peas; a bag of mixed frozen veggies of these varieties is perfect here!)

You COULD cook it bone-in if you are lazy, but keep in mind that it will add another hour or more to the cooking time.  Also, you need to brine it ahead of time, and you might not have a pot that will fit in your fridge, and hold the turkey and the brine.  You could do as I’ve done for whole Thanksgiving turkeys, and brine it in a large picnic cooler with plenty of ice.  But my large cooler is in our Public Storage unit, and I didn’t feel like going out there to get it.  So I boned it out and used the bones to make the stock.

The breast I got weighed about 6 1/2 pounds, which is way bigger than what the recipe calls for.  Boning it out took off about a pound.  I did not increase the glaze recipe at all, it was more than enough as is…but it will take about an hour longer to cook as the recipe calls for.

I also suggest that you remove the skin before cooking this.  If you were doing this in a real BBQ or in the oven, the skin would be nice and crisp.  But in any kind of slow-cooker, even this BBQ Pit thingy, there’s a lot of moisture, which causes poultry skin to be icky and gummy.  So peel off the skin and throw it into the stockpot, along with those bones!

The BBQ Pit booklet recommends that you pour some kind of liquid into the well in the crockery insert.  Plain water will pretty much just keep the fat that drips down from the meat from smoking and burning.  But beer, wine, stock or broth, fruit juice, etc, will also infuse some flavor into the meat as it cooks.  I like to pour a bottle of beer into the well; this time, I used a bottle of Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic that I had sitting around.  It’s not my favorite beer to drink; it came in an assortment package that I had bought over the winter.  But for a recipe like this, which uses cranberries already, it does add a nice flavor.

Okay, so here is the recipe…to lazy to type it out, so I screen-capped it from the book.

I love that I have one of those little netbooks. Rather than using up paper and ink to print recipes I find online, I can just set up the netbook in the kitchen and have the recipe right there in front of me.

Could this recipe be done in a regular slow cooker?  I haven’t tried it, but I would guess so.  You would need a larger model, at least 5 quarts, and oval shaped.  You would also need some kind of wire rack that would fit inside the cooker to put the turkey breast on.  You could also probably roast a turkey breast like this in a regular oven (follow package instructions).  But do not put the glaze on until it is almost done, because the sugars in it will cause it to burn in a regular oven if you brush it on too soon..

Anyhoo, this is great any time of year, you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving to enjoy a turkey dinner.  This would also be good if you are doing Thanksgiving on a smaller scale, and don’t want a zillion leftovers.

Enjoy!

All of the shopping is done. I hope I didn’t forget anything; I’d rather travel all the way to Texas and have dental work done, hold the Novocaine, at the best implant dentist Plano has to offer, than have to go into a supermarket in the few days that precede Toikey Day.  Seriously, that is how bad the supermarkets are in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Sunday is really the last day to go, while it’s still reasonably sane.

First of all, if you like this menu template shown here, you can download it and other cool holiday templates for free HERE.  This includes the one I used last year.  I chose to use this one, this year, because the text that I wanted to use didn’t fit on last year’s template.  And yeah, it’s not true to color, the color cartridge in my printer is going, I need to replace it soon.

So now, let’s talk about the food.  The first course is a twist on the one from last year.  Instead of serving the Old Sturbridge Village Gourd Soup in small bowls, I’m doing a fancy restaurant thing and serving it as shots.  Only I don’t own any actual shot glasses, so old tasting glasses from the Maine Brewers Festival will have to do.  So that makes it a bit more than a shot, but who cares?

You can find the recipe for this here:  Butternut Squash Soup Shots with Candied Bacon.  It includes a recipe for the squash soup which is slightly different from the OSV one, but I’m sticking to the recipe I love best.   I just wanted the recipe for the candied bacon.  Ooooohhh….BACON!

Recipezaar is a great site, in part in that it helps take the guesswork out of reducing or increasing a recipe.  Twelve soup shots are definitely too much for the two of us.

As for the turkey, gravy and stuffing, you may be asking, “what’s a Märzen?”  Well, it’s a German/Oktoberfest style beer, and there are many to choose from, as you can see HERE.  Consult this list if you can’t find the Flying Dog beer where you are, if you want a good alternative.  I chose this one from the Flying Dog Brewery, simply because I saw it at Bert’s Better Beers on Saturday, I like the way the label looked, so I said, what the hell?  This beer has won several awards, and you can learn more about it HERE.

I got the idea to do this, from this article on HopPress.com.    Now, I like the way this Mario Rubio dude thinks!  You need at least three bottles of the Märzen of choice…the first you pop open, pour into your favorite glass, and drink while you cook.  The second bottle goes into the roasting pan with the turkey, and the third is for the gravy.  Having more than three bottles, of course, would be good, as you might want to drink them with the meal!   And, as Mario suggests, you may also want to use this same beer to moisten your stuffing.

Use your favorite turkey/gravy/stuffing recipes for this.  This year, I’m keeping it relatively simple…the roast turkey and gravy from Julia Child’s The Way To Cook, using the beer where wine or stock is called for.  For the past few years, I’ve used Alton Brown’s Good Eats Roast Turkey recipe, complete with the brine, and it’s excellent.  But Julia’s recipe is simpler, and as for brining, I’m just going to use a plain water/salt/sugar brine.  I really want the flavor of the beer to come through, and not fight with any additional brine flavorings.  Just a warning – if you buy a Kosher turkey, or a Butterball® one, do not brine it at all, these already come brined.  If you buy a cheap frozen one for 47¢ a pound (as I did, from Shaw’s), definitely brine it.  It really does make a difference!

The stuffing recipe I’m using is a very basic, New England traditional one, using Bell’s Seasoning.  You’ve probably seen the stuff in the spice section of the store, it’s the one with a picture of a turkey on the box.  See it, right over there?  The stuffing recipe is on the back of the box, but you can also find it HERE.  This makes enough to stuff a 5-pound bird, you can double or even triple it if you need more.  We don’t stuff the turkey anyway, we just bake it up in a casserole dish.  The amount given in this recipe will be plenty for the two of us.

I’m tweaking it in two ways…instead of sauteeing the onions and celery in butter, I’m going to render some bacon fat, and use that, reserving the bacon.  Then when I mix it all together, I’ll add the crumbled cooked bacon.

In keeping with the beer theme, I’m going with this recipe for Roasted Garlic IPA Mashed Potatoes.  This was linked to in the article about beer and turkey that I linked to above.

For this recipe, I am choosing to go with Gritty McDuff’s 21 IPA.  IPAs (India Pal Ale) are hoppy and on the bitter side, and not to everyone’s taste, for sure.  But this recipe only uses a few spoonfuls, too much would certainly overpower the dish.  And since it only uses a few spoonfuls, guess who gets to drink the rest?

There are many great IPAs out there.  I went with Gritty’s 21 because I’d had some at both the Maine and New Hampshire Brewers Festivals, and I really liked it.  It’s a bit hard to find near where I live, but I did find it on our visit to the aforementioned Bert’s Better Beers.

The Brussels Sprouts with Sweet & Sour Bacon Dressing is a repeat from last year.  And butternut squash makes an encore appearance, in this simple Baked Butternut Squash.  Click on the links to access these recipes.  As for the rest of the menu, the cranberry sauce is out of a can, and the pumpkin pie was store-bought.  I’m just not too good at making pies!

But, speaking of pumpkins, one of the stars of the show promises to be Pugsley’s Signature Series Smashed Pumpkin Ale, a very special seasonal brew from Alan Pugsley, the brewmaster of Shipyard Brewing Company up in Portland, Maine.  I could not wait to try this once it first came out, as I LOVE pumpkin ales.  I had it for the first time, on tap at the Great Lost Bear up in Portland over Labor Day weekend, and was NOT disappointed.

This is sold in 22 ounce bottles, and has been flying off the shelves.  I had heard that Shipyard’s retail store had sold out, but on the way home from Labor Day weekend in Maine, I did find exactly two bottles in Federal Jack’s retail store, in Kennebunk.  The Shipyard store has since restocked, and so has Federal Jack’s, and you can bet I stocked up, before it’s gone for the season.  Also, I saw a decent amount of it at Bert’s Better Beers, in Hooksett, NH, the other day.

Who needs homemade pumpkin pie?  This is better!

Happy Toikey Day to all!

Now, for those of you who might not know a Turducken from an UGG Classic Short Boot, let me enlighten you.  A Turducken is a chicken, stuffed into a duck, which is then stuffed into a turkey.  It is indeed a very time-consuming process, as you’d have to bone out all three birds and all.  Most people who want to try Turducken choose to order one that someone else made, there are several websites from which you can order.  They are not cheap, however, they go for around $85 or so.

But, just for entertainment value, if you get Create TV in your area, you can see an episode of Chef Paul’s “Always Cooking”, where he will show you How To Make A Turducken.

Create TV is a digital TV channel from PBS.  It features shows about cooking, crafts, gardening, home improvement, and travel, all from the vast PBS television library.  Although it is a digital channel, you do not need to have cable to get it.  If it is available in your area, you should be able to pick it up with a digital TV, or with an older analog TV equipped with a converter box.

I know you probably aren’t ambitious enough to make a Turducken, either, but it sure is fun to watch!

I’m always looking for interesting things to make.  Today I came upon this recipe:  Butternut Squash Soup Shots with Candied Bacon.  Apparently, serving soups as *shots* is one of the latest fancy restaurant trends.  I can easily see doing this as a starter for our Thanksgiving dinner.

I already have a favorite recipe for butternut squash soup – the heavenly Old Sturbridge Village Gourd Soup.  But I printed out the recipe from Recipezaar, because I wanted to know how to make the candied bacon.  Yum…BACON!  Yes, I think this will be a wonderful starter for our Thanksgiving feast!

For all of my Toikey Day posts, past and present, click on category Toikey Day here or in the sidebar.

The first book is called Giving Thanks:  Thanksgiving Recipes & History, From Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie.  This lovely book was put out by the folks of Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum which depicts life in Plymouth Colony in the 1600′s.  I have never actually been to Plimoth Plantation, I actually bought* this book at Strawbery Banke, a living history museum in Portsmouth, NH.  I’m sure the Plimoth Plantation museum store has it, as well.

This book delves deep into the history of Thanksgiving in America…you will learn what the Pilgrims and Native Americans REALLY ate back then, how Thanksgiving became a national holiday, and much. much more.  Interspersed with your history lessons are dozens of tasty recipes, as well as photographs and drawings from the vast archives of Plimoth Plantation.

And here we have the newly revised and updated edition of the Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook.  I just bought* this book yesterday at the OSV museum shop.  I already had the previous edition, but this new one is so much better organized than the last one, and also contains more recipes.  I had been disappointed that the last edition did not contain the recipe for Gourd Soup, which we first had at one of OSV’s Hearthside Bounty dinners.  But this edition does have it, and you MUST try it, it is so very, very yummie!

Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts which depicts New England life in the early to mid 1800′s.  Of course, they didn’t have electricity back then, nor any of the fancy kitchen gadgets we have now.  In those days, all of the cooking was done in the fireplace.  If you visit OSV, you are likely to find a costumed interpreter demonstrating hearth cooking in any one of several exhibit houses.

The OSV cookbook is unique in that the recipes are presented both as they would have been cooked in the 1830′s, and the method for modern-day cooking.  So, if you have a fireplace and some cast-iron pans (which is what they used to cook in back in the day), and you want to give hearth cooking a shot, this book will show you how.  But, if you’re like me, living in a apartment and dreaming of having a fireplace one day, you can still re-create all of these great recipes the modern way!

The links I gave for both books go to Amazon.  But if you buy them directly from the museum shops, a portion of the proceeds goes to help support the museums, which I think is an important thing.  If you can’t get to these museum shops, you can always order the books from their online shops.

Happy reading…and eating!

*Disclosure: I am a member of both Old Sturbridge Village and Strawbery Banke museums, and was not compensated by them, nor by Plimoth Plantation, to promote the museums or their publications. I pay the annual membership dues just like everyone else who’s a member.  I purchased both of these books, and only got the standard 10% discount that all members receive.

click image for larger recipe page

This is an excellent weeknight recipe, because you don’t need to cook a chicken from scratch to make it.  Most supermarkets have a prepared food/deli department that sells rotisserie chickens.

If you have Boston Market in your area (I know they are now in areas other than greater Boston), they are having a special where if you spend $19.99 or more on a Family Meal, you can get a rotisserie chicken for just $1.99.

I happened to have leftover roast chicken in the fridge, so that is what I used here.  Note that I cross-filed this in the toikey day category, as this could also be a turkey pot pie, using Thanksgiving leftovers.

The biscuit topping is much easier than having to roll out a regular pie crust.  Refrigerator biscuits are a perfectly acceptable ingredient, especially for the baking-impaired among us.  Pillsbury makes a good product here.

However, I had the time, so I made my own biscuits.  I have this cast iron drop biscuit pan, so I used that.

Another thing I did was make my own chicken stock, rather than buying it at the store.  There is certainly nothing wrong with the store-bought variety, so if you can’t be bothered to make your own stock, use it.  I recommend the Swanson brand here, and I prefer the boxed variety over canned.  With the boxes, if you don’t use it all in your recipe, you can just reseal it and keep it in the fridge.  Please be sure to buy the low-sodium variety, this is easy enough to find.  The regular kind is always too salty and can ruin your recipe.  Also, too much salt is bad for your health.

However, you can save money by making your own chicken stock.  I am a big advocate of using a slow-cooker to make stocks, it’s something I got from a book called Slow Cooker Ready & Waiting: 160 Sumptuous Meals That Cook Themselves by Rick Rodgers.  This is an excellent book that should be a part of the library of anyone who owns a slow-cooker.  BTW, I own four slow cookers!

The night before you plan to serve the pot pie, pick all of the meat from the chicken.  The skin can either be discarded, or eaten…I consider it to the the chef’s treat…LOL!  Put the chicken meat into a container and refrigerate until ready to use.

Put the chicken carcass into a slow-cooker that has at least a 5 quart capacity.  You don’t need to hack it up or anything, I just put it in whole.  Then roughly chop a couple of carrots, an onion, and a rib of celery with leaves, and put those in with the carcass.  I don’t bother to peel the onion or carrots.  Ass a couple of sprigs each of fresh parsley and thyme, about half a dozen whole black peppercorns, and a bay leaf.  If you don’t have fresh herbs, use a couple of pinches of the dried variety instead.  This recipe is NOT written in stone, use what’s on hand!

Add water to cover, put the lid on the cooker, and cook this on LOW overnight.  The next day, strain it into a metal pot and discard the solids.  They have given up all their flavor and nutrients to the stock, so they are not very good for eating.

If you are not going to use the stock right away, it is important to “quick-chill” it before you put it in the fridge.  This is why I told you to strain this into a pot.  Never attempt the following in the crockery insert of your slow cooker…cold water hitting the hot crockery will cause it to crack.  Then you’ll have nothing but a big mess and the need to buy a new crock-pot.

To “quick-chill”, close the drain on your sink and put the pot of stock in the sink.  Fill the sink with cold water, up to almost the top of the pot.  Don’t let any water get into the pot of stock!  This will quickly bring the stock down to a temperature where it’s safe to put it in the fridge, about 90 degrees F.  I know that doesn’t sound “chilled”, but it was much hotter than that before.  It’s all relative.

Never put anything in the fridge that is hot from the stove, oven, or crock-pot.  Always let it cool down first.  Putting hot food in the fridge not only reduces the efficiency of the fridge, but can also cause other foods therein to warm up and possibly spoil.  This was something that the chef-instructors hammered into our heads at culinary school, but it’s just as important in the home kitchen!

For a more intense flavor, I like to boil the stock down.  If you do this, just be careful not to boil it down too much, as you will need 2 3/4 cups of it for the pot pie.  Any stock not used for the recipe can be refrigerated for a few days, or frozen if you want to keep it around longer.

So, whether you use homemade biscuits and chicken stock, or store-bought, give this recipe a try.  It’s very easy and very, very tasty!

All that’s left now is a container of turkey soup, which was made with the meat that got cooked off the carcass when I made the Slow Cooker Toikey Stock, Part Deux.  To make the soup, I used a slight variation of Alton Brown’s Bird to the Last Drop leftover soup recipe.

I did not use the vegetable stock, as I had a good amount of the turkey stock.  The Part Deux turned out to be a very thick, rich stock, even more gelatinous than the first go-round, the one I made before Thanksgiving with the turkey necks that I had bought.  You may recall that this original stock was used to make gravy and moisten stuffing.  Still, I had a good amount left, so that went into the crock pot with the hacked-up carcass and enough water to fill.

I strained out this stock, cooled it down, and put it in a container in the fridge.  When it was fully chilled, all of the fat floated to the top and hardened, that was easy to scrape off.  The stock underneath had gelatinized.  Meanwhile, I picked over the meat, put that into another container for the fridge, and discarded the bones.  Nothing more could I get out of them by this point.  I wrapped the bones very carefully before throwing them in the trash, because I didn’t want the cats to be able to easily get to them.  Poultry bones should not be given to kitties…nor dogs, they can splinter and cause choking.

When I was ready to make my soup, I dumped all of the thick stock into a large pot.  Since it was so very thick, I added some water to thin it out a bit.  The flavor would have been way too strong if I did not water it down.  When it was boiling, I threw in some uncooked egg noodles.  Yeah, I know AB calls for rice in his recipe, but I prefer noodles in my soup.  When the noodles were almost all the way cooked, I threw in the frozen veggies (which had been thawed), the meat, and the seasonings.  AB called for Old Bay Seasoning, dried thyme, salt & pepper, that is what I used.  Old Bay Seasoning is something that is more frequently used for seafood, and at first sounds odd in a turkey soup.  But I happened to have a tin of it on hand, and used it…it really does add something to the soup.  If you don’t have any, and don’t want to buy any, you could always just use poultry seasoning, or some other pre-made spice mix.  I like Emeril’s Essences and Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Seasonings, I always have a few varieties of those on hand, as well.  Or you can mix up your own spice blend.

So there you have it…all that is left from our Thanksgiving feast is a container of soup and a little gravy.  I think I will mix the gravy into the leftover soup to use it up.

For Christmas, I think we will have a ham.  Ham is a lot less work, as hams are already fully cooked.  And if you buy a spiral-sliced ham, which are usually on sale for under two bucks a pound this time of year, that is even less work.  I just heat it in the oven for about an hour or so, and then brush it with a glaze made of apply jelly and Dijon mustard.  Yummie!  Recipe to come soon!

Anyhoo, everything turned out very well.  But we’re not done yet!  Remember my post about slow-cooker turkey stock?  Well, now, how’s about slow-cooker turkey stock, part deux?

After we had our feast, I used my electric knife to dismantle the leftover turkey, and wrapped up slices of breast meat in one big piece of aluminum foil, and drums/wings in another.  That left me with a turkey carcass with plenty of meat still stuck to it.  This is NOT to be thrown away…not yet.

I hacked up the carcass into small enough pieces, and put them all into my 5 quart crock-pot.  We had a 13 pound turkey, it fit very nicely.  I had some of the original slow-cooker turkey stock left over after using it for stuffing and gravy, so I poured that into the cooker.  Then I topped it off with some plain old H2O, put the lid on, and let it cook on LOW all day.  If you didn’t make any turkey stock, or just don’t have any left over, just use all water.

Any meat that is left on the bones will fall right off after a good long cooking like this.  Strain the liquid into a pot, then put it into the sink (with the drain plug in), run cold water AROUND it, this will make it cool down quicker.  When it is cooled down, refrigerate.

As for the solids in the colander, when they are cool enough to handle, you need to pick through them and dispose of any bones or skin…any skin that’s been cooked in liquid that long gets all nasty and gummy.  There should be a good deal of meat left, and this you will use for turkey soup, turkey hash, turkey pot pie, turkey a la king (I sound like the Old Man in the movie A Christmas Story, don’t I?).

Soup is the easiest thing to make with these leftovers.  What I like to do is take some of the stock, put in in a large pot, and bring to the boil.  Throw in some egg noodles, and cook them in the stock.  Then throw in a box or bag of mixed frozen veggies (which should be thawed first).  You know, the variety that contains a mixture of green beans, peas, carrots, corn, and such.  And then add some turkey meat.  Season with salt and pepper and whatever else, to taste.  Exact amounts aren’t important, it depends on how much stock and meat you have sitting around.  Use your own good judgement.

Enjoy!

1 large egg
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons melted butter
1 tablespoon baking powder

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Butter or grease an 8-inch square cake pan. Place all dry ingredients in a large bowl, whisk to combine. Whisk in egg, milk, and melted butter until just combined. Pour batter into the prepared pan, bake for 30 minutes on the middle rack of the oven.

Bake this the day before, at least, and leave it out to get stale, freshly baked bread is NOT good for stuffing! My cats seem to love this, and I have caught them nibbling on it. No need to toss it, it gets baked in the oven as stuffing anyway. Also, cats are cleaner than most people, even if they do lick their own butts.

“Kitty nibbles” never hurt anyone! LOL!