A Cozy Pantry and Zero Waste: My Annual Turkey Tradition

It's that time of year where we have big meals, fully bellies, and lots of left overs.  A few years ago I started making turkey bone broth with the left over carcass.   I have also canned turkey soup from the left over turkey meat. There have been a few years where we had an extra turkey that we just stored in the freezer, with the intent of pulling it out later and having a few more turkey meals.  But, the reality is that it never happens that way.  Every year I end up with another turkey in the freezer just waiting to be cooked.  So this year I had the idea of just cooking them all...which happened to be almost 2 1/2 turkeys' worth of meat, bones, the works!

Yes, at one point I wondered what I was thinking with this brilliant idea I had.  But now that it's all said and done, I'm glad I chose to just do it all at once.  One big mess, then 3 rounds of canning, and I'm officially done with dealing with all that turkey!

Here's the breakdown of how that all worked:

We used 2 roasters.  Each one had a full turkey in it (15ish pounds or more) and then one of them also had a turkey breast with the bone, so roughly another 1/2 turkey.  We made our regular Thanksgiving day meal.  Then we took all the meat off the bones to store in the fridge.  With the carcasses, we used both roasters and made a few gallons worth of bone broth.  I like to let mine brew at least 24 hours, usually closer to 48 hrs.  I then take the broth and strain it into jars.  Once the jars are cooled, I place them in the refrigerator for a day or so, so that the fat can rise to the top and I can easily scrape it off.  I store the fat in another jar in the fridge to use in other meals.

While I'm waiting for my broth to chill, I usually make up a large batch of turkey soup (no noodles) and can it up for use throughout the year.  This year I had about 3 canners worth of turkey soup.  19 quarts and 14 pints to be exact.  And that's just the ones that canned properly.  I ended up with 1 quart and 1 pint size jar that didn't seal properly. So they went into the fridge and we had them as a meal on another night.

Next up was canning the broth.  I usually can it all in pint size jars because I rarely need more than 2 cups worth at a time.  It's so concentrated that I usually dilute it and still have plenty of flavor.  This year I decided to can both pint and half-pint sizes.  I had 8 jars of each.  

That may seem like a LOT of canned goods of the same thing, but I like to share!  So my mom will get some, my daughter will have some to enjoy, and I'll probably even take a small jar of soup to my Granny.  That's the joy of canning...everyone can benefit and enjoy it!  And very little food has to go to waste!  I love having a want not-waste not kitchen!