The day after Easter, I found a fresh organic turkey in the meat manager's special bin, marked down 50%. The bird made it into my cart long before I remembered that 13 lbs of bird is a lot for one person to eat. Oops.
Since the turkey was already approaching it's sell-by date, I decided to roast it that evening after I finished preparing dinner. If they're not stuffed, turkeys really don't take that long to cook. I don't really care about presentation, so my cooking method of choice is to sprinkle the turkey generously with dried herbs, salt, and pepper, then dump the thing breast-side down into a roasting bag. With this method, you get super juicy breast-meat and a tender-throughout turkey in 2-3 hrs. When the timer went off, I literally cut open the bag and disassembled the turkey by hand, 10 minutes before I went off to bed.
I knew I was going to have to freeze part of the turkey since there's no way I should be eating 13 lbs of turkey before it went bad :-) I also wanted to replenish my freezer with some quick go-to meals since I had recently eaten down my stock of those. Here's what I ended up making.
1) Plain cooked turkey breast (freezer)- this will be great for sandwiches or quick dinners down the road.
2) Two quarts of turkey stock + shredded dark meat (freezer) . You know it's a good stock when you cool it overnight in the fridge and it turns solid on you. I put all of the bones and pan drippings into a pot with a few quarts of water, and a few bay leaves, then simmered for 4 hrs or so. I tend to leave out salt and other spices until I decide what to use the stock for. I've found you can also do this overnight in the crockpot!
3) Turkey bean burritos (1 dinner + 3 freezer lunches). I mixed up shredded dark meat turkey, a can of re fried beans, diced onion, green chiles, vegan cheese, cumin, cayenne, salt, pepper, and some chipotle Tabasco sauce and used that to stuff a bunch of tortillas. I rolled them up, then put them seam side down in a baking dish, and baked at 375 for 20-30 min. The baking step seems to reinforce the tortilla a little bit so that they thaw from frozen a little better.
4) Turkey + farro deliciousness (2 dinner + 1 lunch). I've had a bag of farro hiding in my pantry for the past few months, and this time I actually remembered to measure some out and put it in a bowl of water to soak before I went to work. When I came home, I started googling recipes, and ended up falling for this smitten kitchen recipe (http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2013/07/one-pan-farro-with-tomatoes/ ) because 1) it looked easy, and 2) I had all of the ingredients on hand. I topped it with shredded turkey and it was FANTASTIC. Highly recommended.
5) Turkey salad (1 dinner + 3 lunches). I am not a big fan of white meat for most applications, but when slathered in mayo, it does pretty well. This version ended up having finely diced sweet onion, dried cranberries, quartered red grapes, tarragon, honey dijon mustard, and mayo. Wrapped up in some remaining tortillas with some crisp romaine, it was delicious.
Needless to say, my kitchen was a disaster zone the first half of the week (at one point I had zero clean bowls of any shape or size). In the end it wasn't actually that much work, considering how many delicious meals I got out of the bird and how well-stocked my freezer is again. I will totally not hesitate to pick up another discount turkey next time I run across one (which I assume will be long after I eat up my frozen leftovers!).
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