Turkey Steam

So Thanksgiving has come & gone at the GeekFarm. Now what do I do with all this turkey?

Sam’s Club offers turkeys 16 pounds and up, so I bought the smallest tom I could find.It was more than enough for the seven people at the table (me, Suzan, her parents, my brother, my mom & her s.o.). The RenFair sized turkey legs were untouched along with the wings, and one breast was hidden at carving for post-Thanksgiving sandwiches.

The neck & giblets were frozen right before I brined the bird (thanks Alton Brown, now that I know your secret I’m doomed to make juicy turkey forever). Various bits of fowl went into large packets of foil (some will go home with my mom, some will be frozen, some are lunch over the weekend).

Suzan’s parents & my brother headed for home. Dishes were washed, leftovers were sealed in small plastic containers. That left the carcas & random bones. It’s 9:00pm and I don’t want to figure out how to cram that thing into my freezer.

Hey, let’s make stock.

One pressure cooker, one onion, some water, a pile’o’herbs, salt, pepper & my last bay leaf spent 30 minutes steaming away in the kitchen. Mom retreated, thinking back to horror stories of pressure cookers exploding in kitchens of old (this was in the days before UL ratings, lawsuits & nifty locking lids). Suzan and I were lounging in the kitchen, trying to resist the urge to eat something (body says “hungry”, brain says “shut up you pig!”).

At the end of the cooking cycle, I popped the steam release valve on the cooker. It was like opening a can of “Glade Thanksgiving” and dumping it into the air vents. The house filled with turkey-scented steam that instantly made every creature in the house crave a bit of the bird (even the cats, repelled by the noise of the steam valve, were interested int he new smells).

Fortunately we resisted the urge to re-stuff ourselves & went to bed content with the contents of our bellies. Friday morning involved sleeping in, missing the garbage run (doh!) and shooing the last guests out the door (with driving instructions that bypass most major malls). Suzan and I now digest & plan the rest of a long weekend.