Turkey and Noodles

This is a pretty great way to use up your leftover turkey carcass from Thanksgiving (I wrote this post back near the beginning of December... I swear I didn't keep a turkey carcass for a whole month!).  This is the first time I've made it, and while I found some recipes online that come pretty close to the recipe given to me by my mom, nothing quite duplicated it exactly.  What I think sets it apart are the noodles - I love these noodles.  I love a lot of things (especially when related to food), but these noodles are easily in my top 10.


Turkey and Noodles
leftover turkey carcass (2-3 cups turkey meat)
1 tsp salt
2 cups flour
3 eggs
flour to use for the dough 
more flour mixed with water for thickening, if necessary

You start by taking a large stockpot and breaking down your turkey carcass so it will fit (I hate the sound of bones breaking), then filling the entire thing with water.  Boil it for 2 hours or so (or uh, 4, if you're like me and forget things), then strain all the bones and meat out so you're left with a lovely broth.  Carefully remove the meat from the bones and discard the bones.  If you end up with around 2-3 cups of meat that's just dandy!

What remained of our Thanksgiving turkey on November 28th...

So we have our broth and our turkey, now we need the noodles.  I LOVE THESE NOODLES.  Ahem.  Sorry, my inner 12-year-old escape for a moment.  Anyway!  These are very easy, stupidly easy, actually!  They're flour, salt and eggs.

Make a well in the center for the eggs, then break the yolks and start mixing everything together with your fork.  It's O.K. if the dough is sticky - you can add more flour if you want.  The beauty of this recipe is if you don't like how something looks, add more flour, water or eggs until it looks the way it should, damnit!

For example, I felt my dough was crumbly and needed another egg.  It's all very "do what looks right".

Once you have your dough, break it into quarters and roll one of the quarters out on a well-floured surface.  This is starting to look familiar, right?

Pie dough or noodle dough... any kind of dough!

Roll the dough up like a long cinnamon bun!  Then cut it.

Mmm flour, salt and eggs... wait.

 Then you just unroll the noodles on a floured cookie sheet, and repeat 3 more times with the remaining 3/4s of the dough.  Don't be afraid to use a lot of flour, these noodles get sticky AND the extra flour will help thicken the broth (which you'll probably have to do anyway, with a flour/water mix).

Bring the broth (remember that?) back up to a boil, then drop the noodles in and cook for about 5-8 minutes.  My noodles ended up huge, but that was okay, because DM isn't picky and I like a lot of texture in my noodles. 

Somehow I forgot to take a photo of the final product, but trust me: it was delicious.  We devoured it all quite happily.

Organizing Recipes

I love to cook and try out new recipes.  You know what I don't love to do?  Organize things.  This is what my recipe "file" looked like for months and months and months (like seriously, before I even moved into this house.  THAT WAS 1.5 YEARS AGO.):

WHY. D:

Lately I've been playing with the idea of making my own darned recipe cards because 1. I have a lot of free time; 2. I have a husband who is really really, ridiculously good in Illustrator and 3. I can't find any recipe cards I'm in total besotted love with (that might be my own fault, I'm notoriously picky.  I can afford to be - I went to school for art!)

So the first step to this project was to figure out a way to organize everything (which I still haven't fully figured out), but a pretty reasonable place to start seemed to be the basic categories: appetizers, main dish, side dish and desserts.  At the end of it all, the poor appetizer category only had three (literally) entries, while the desserts section was so stuffed it was threatening to spill over into the side dish section.

Just desserts?  Moar like ALL DESSERTS.  Nom nom nom.

I'm thinking of breaking these down further into subcategories (like maybe "cakes", "candies", "cookies" etc for desserts) because I have more recipes floating around and eventually want to make a giant book of recipes I can pass along to friends and family.

Fun fact: There is not a single beverage recipe in this pile.  I'm not sure what that means.