You’ve got left over turkey and you made your own turkey stock…now what do you do with it? This was my first year to make turkey stock, well or stock of any kind, so I was a little nervous. We had a 19 pound turkey which means the carcass was huge and I had to split the carcass into two parts and made two 
batches of stock.
Making the stock was super easy and now I can’t figure out why I’ve never done this before! I quartered an onion, snapped 4 stalks of celery in half and tossed in half a dozen mini carrots then filled my crock pot to the top with water. Though the first batch I didn’t quite put enough water in to cover everything. This batch got a little more gelatin like then the second batch. I cooked each batch about 8 hours (I think that was overkill), then letit sit in the crockpot a couple hours to cool off, then I put in the fridge.
Today I finally buckled down and made Turkey Noodle Soup. I had all the ingredients I needed at home except an onion, so after my morning trip to the grocery store I got busy chopping. The ingredients are few and the steps are easy which makes this recipe perfect! The recipe comes from Simply Nourished and only has minor modifications.
Turkey Noodle Soup Ingredients
2 1/2 cups chopped, cooked turkey
4 cups turkey stock
1 cup water
1 onion
4 stalks of celery
10 mini carrots
1 cup uncooked pasta
4 cloves of garlic
salt & pepper to taste
What took the longest was chopping the onion. I chopped the whole onion and tossed it into a heated pot to soften while I chopped the celery, carrots and garlic. I let the onion and vegetables cook overall about 10 minutes while everything was being chopped. I like to cook them on their own first because in the broth I don’t feel like they soften that well. I like my vegetables to be chunky in soup except for celery so that I can tell what all is in each bite. Once the onions started to look transparent I added the stock and water and brought the pot to a boil. I turned the heat down, put the lid on and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes.
I sprinkled in a little salt and pepper. Then next I added the uncooked pasta and turkey and brought it to a boil again then turned the heat back down and let it cook for about 8 minutes. The original recipe called for egg noodles but I wanted to use whole wheat and already had the Rotini so I went with that.
I should probably stop here and confess that while the soup was cooking, I couldn’t help but think the turkey stock smelled weird. It just wasn’t the same as chicken broth and I was really nervous that this soup would be gross! Thank goodness I was wrong. This soup was so rich with flavor that it was divine.
Once it all came together the flavors were just right and I might be obsessed with this whole homemade stock thing. I easily have another 4 cups of stock in my fridge that if I don’t come up with another recipe may be going in the freezer to use down the road.
To save time later this week and have some meals ready I went ahead and divided out the soup into 4 equal portions. The recipe I got this from said that it made 6 servings but they would have been pretty small servings. I may try freezing one serving just to see how it holds up, but if not I’ve got 3 more meals to eat this week. 
This Turkey Noodle Soup is relatively clean, the only hindrance is the pasta. I plugged all of the ingredients into My Fitness Pal and it calculated that each serving had 278 calories in it.
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