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.