Turn Your Failed Turkey into Soup

Happy quarantined Easter!

I thought I would take the odd nature of this Easter to roast my first turkey. With no company and only the taste buds of my husband I thought if I failed, this was the time to do it.

 

As the roasting experience is now behind me I’m glad that was my approach.

It started off with not having a roasting rack and using a cheese grater to elevate the bird.  A master chef likely would have stopped right there! 

I seasoned, basted and used a meat thermometer. Scraped dripping for gravy and had all the fixings waiting.

After about 4 hours the temperature was right, the colour looked good and we were hungry.

As we sat down and cut open the bird, it did not want to cut. Like rubber. This was the first sign of failure.

The legs did not fall off the bone like I had seen year after year… and we definitely were not fighting over who gets to eat the wings. Instead we sat there looking at our plates and laughing. This did not go as expected!

Lessons learned:

I am quite sure my oven was not hot enough and in the end the bird was cooked too low. As it took on a very rubbery texture. I think our first attempt at cutting it open was likely happening while it was a little underdone.

The bird went back in the oven at a higher temperature. It certainly is cooked now and fairly dry. Thankfully we laughed through the whole experience and Sunny our poodle had an awesome turkey addition to her nightly bowl of kibble.

Dan ate pizza pockets for dinner that night.

Following day I’m now motivated to resurrect this turkey. It’s Easter Sunday.

So I thought, I would find success turning it into a hearty soup. Thankfully this worked.

If your turkey was also a failure, try this!

You need:

About 60% of your failed turkey meat

4 cups of stock

1 cup of peas

4 mini sweet red pepper

3 celery sticks

1 tsp thyme

Salt & pepper

1/2 cup of rice

Do this:

Dice up your turkey and vegetables.

Heat your liquid. Add salt and pepper. Add in the veggies followed by turkey. Boil for 10 minutes then add in the rice. Let this stay on a medium heat for about 15 minutes and serve.

Lessons learned! Hopefully I’ll never have to roast a turkey in quarantine again.