Turkey cleanup, packaging and soup

I brought the leftover turkey and sides home to separate, package, and make soup. This was a big job; it took over 4 hours!

The first step, Thanksgiving night, was to cut off the good parts of the meat so I could more conveniently seal them up in 2 ziplock plastic bags to refrigerate until tomorrow.

And then hack apart the rest of the carcass with the Asian bone cleaver so it will fit in a ziplock bag, and also into the pressure cooker tomorrow.

Bagged to wait until the next day.

I basically used my chicken stock recipe , but made a little more since the turkey carcass was a lot larger.

2 stalks celery 2 carrots 1 onion, quartered 2 bay leaves 1/2 tsp. black pepper corns 1/2 tsp. salt 1 carcass of turkey (not sure how big it was originally, maybe 16 - 18 pounds?) 80 oz. water

All of the ingredients into the pressure cooker. I used the Soup setting on the Instant Pot, which is about 30 minutes of pressure cooking at high pressure, once it gets up to temperature. With 20 minutes of cooling when done, it takes more than an hour, but still way faster than a stock pot!

And I had a mimosa while it was doing its thing.

Vacuum sealed and froze 4 packages of mashed potatoes, 6.0 oz. each. The trick is to reheat the mashed potatoes boil-in-bag or in the sous vide. Even better is to put them into a sauté pan afterwards and whip them with some more butter and cream. They're almost as good as fresh then!

And sweet potatoes, 2 per package. There were only enough for 3 packages.

And 4 packages of stuffing, 4.0 oz. each. There was a lot left over, so I made one 8.0 oz. package. I saw a post on Facebook for some bacon wrapped stuffing bites that looked good. I might use the leftover stuffing and try those.

The breast meat and a little dark meat. 4 packages for dinner, 5.0 oz. each. And 2 packages for sandwich, 3.0 oz. each. The dinner servings are reheated in the sous vide, 30 minutes at 155°F from frozen.

Here's the rest of the of the good meat. That will go into soup and meat for stir-fry.

Gravy, 4 packages of 6.0 oz. each, 1 package for each dinner. I put the frozen package in the sous vide with the turkey and mashed potatoes, then finish the gravy in a sauce pan on the stove. This is important, because you need to get it up to boiling and stir it like crazy to get the texture back to normal after freezing.

And a whole meal's worth of vacuum sealed packages.

And then the vacuum sealed packages get grouped together in a zip-lock for an easy meal in the future.

Here's the stock cooling in a sink full of cold water.

And the contents of the stock pot picked out. The white bowl is the good bits of meat, to which I'll add some that I cut up earlier. And the 64 oz. of stock; that goes into the refrigerator so the fat rises to the top and can be skimmed off.

Each package of soup gets 3.0 oz. turkey and 16 fl. oz. stock.

Vacuum sealed in bags.

And those bags into a bigger zip-lock bag. The paper towels are because soup flattens out so much that if there's any moisture on the bags they can freeze together, which is kind of annoying!

The leftover turkey that's not going into the soup is for stir-fry, 4 packages of 3.2 oz. each.

And that's it!

4 full Thanksgiving dinners in the future 2 turkey for sandwich 4 turkey for stir-fry 4 turkey soup lunches