Dark Days: Leftovers!

I’m probably going to be using up Thanksgiving leftovers for the entire winter season.  I wanted to make sure I bought a local turkey, so I went to our neighborhood shop (American Provision) that specializes in local fare.  We had Thanksgiving the weekend BEFORE the actual holiday, so our options for a fresh, unfrozen turkey, were limited.  I ended up getting a 14 pound bird from Misty Knolls, which is actually 200 miles away, and not nearly so ideal as I'd previously been led to believe.  I would have preferred a bird from Natick Community Organic where I used to work and volunteer, but they tend to have big birds, and I didn’t want to end up with a 33 pounder.  For a group of 4, 14 pounds was more than enough.  Out of my turkey purchase I’ve made turkey broth, and then bone broth, and I’ve frozen a ton of meat.

This weekend, for my husband’s 41^st birthday, we went on a hike in the Blue Hills Reservation, only 20 minutes away by car.  It was wonderfully (and a bit unnaturally) warm, but cool enough that something warm, like a soup or stew, was just the thing after the end of a 3 hour hike.  Since I’m involved in the Dark Days challenge I decided to pull out some turkey and some homemade bone broth from the freezer and make a soup.

I have a bucket of sand in the basement preserving the carrots I grew this year.  I’ve “sanded” some of the potatoes I grew as an experiment to see which way holds them the best through winter.  Beside the turkey, broth, carrots, and potato, I needed to add spices, which were not local.  I did have some local spices in my weekly box this year, but I often failed to preserve them, so I’m using my stockpile of organic spices purchased primarily at our local food cooperative, Harvest CoOp. 

I have to confess, I also snuck some gluten free noodles into the soup.  The noodles were an unnecessary addition, but I was also feeding friends and I wanted the soup to taste close to chicken noodle.  It got me thinking about making some homemade noodles and drying them for occasions like this where I really want to fill out my soup.  For my first official entry into the Dark Days challenge I suppose it’s not quite there yet, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?