A tale of three turkeys

When people find out how many children we have, there are three areas that seem to be of highest interest: 1. How much food to I cook? 2. How much laundry I do and 3. What do we drive. Having just finished a food heavy holiday, I thought I would talk about Thanksgiving food and large families.

We were hosting this year, so there were twenty-six people total for dinner. My sisters-in-law and I spread out the dishes, so we were only responsible for turkey, stuffing, rolls, and apple pie. I also made cranberry sauce as well as our family's own personal stash of cranberry-orange relish. This is because we are all about the leftover turkey sandwiches, which I may have mentioned before. Much of our Thanksgiving preparations are with an eye towards making sure that there are enough leftovers to have sufficient sandwiches. This is all to explain why I bought three 20-pound turkeys.

The first turkey we cooked the day before and cut the meat off the bones, saving the bones. The second turkey we cooked on the holiday itself, warming up the extra turkey from the day before to make sure we had enough for seconds. This turned out to be a good thing and we did need it. For the curious, all turkey stayed here and was totally finished yesterday. The bones from both turkeys went into the roaster for broth.

Today was part two of dealing with the turkeys. Last night we chilled the broth so I could skim the fat today and so the third turkey could go in the roaster. I pressure canned the broth this afternoon, ending up with six quarts. (The amount was a little low because we had turkey soup with some of it last night.) J. is currently taking the meat off the bones of the third turkey right now. We will use that meat for sandwiches this week. My guess is it won't even last until next Sunday. The bones from this turkey are back in the roaster, where we'll cook more broth. Wednesday I'll can all of that.

We had some stuffing leftover because we cut-up a bit too much bread. Tonight for dinner, to go along with the lemon roasted chicken thighs we were having, I saved some of the broth and made more stuffing. We had a bit of gravy leftover, so we had that on the stuffing as well. The rest of the cubed bread I froze for an easy side dish some time in the future.

I still have some cranberry sauce which is open in the refrigerator. Tomorrow we'll have cranberry chicken cooked in the crockpot and served over noodles for dinner, which will take care of the rest of that. What pie has been leftover has been eaten for breakfast and is now long gone. 

And truly, that's it for any Thanksgiving leftovers. I'm not even sure you can call that third turkey a leftover since I bought it on purpose for sandwiches. Thus ends the fascinating and riveting tale of three turkeys.