Turkey stock

Yesterday was a day of recovery for me, as I imagine it was for many people across the United States. After as long a lie-in as our fourteen-month-old would let us have, my wife and I spent most of the morning just sitting around the house staring at the huge piles of dirty plates, the charred and greasy pots, the empty wine bottles, and the shreds of turkey shrapnel which covered every available surface in our kitchen.

Then we struck a deal. The wife would watch the kid while I cleaned everything up. Right on.

So a couple of hours later I'm standing in my now-gleaming kitchen, feeling pretty proud of myself. I'm still way too full to eat, but there's a fair amount of the day left. And we'd decided, early on, that no-one was leaving the house. So what to do?

Turkey stock, of course.

I grabbed the largest pot I own, and shoved it on the stove with some coarsely-chopped mirepoix and seasonings, half-filling it with water. While it started to warm up, I hoisted the turkey-carcass onto the counter, and began the tedious task of picking through it, searching for the scraps of meat that would feed us for the next several days. Once I'd amassed a mounding plateful, I gave it up and grabbed the cleaver. A few minutes later, after some ear-splitting sounds of splintering bone (and the occasional cursing from me as a turkey leg went spinning across the kitchen floor), the carcass was in pieces and happily in the stock-pot.

The rest of the day was as pleasant as could be. Me, my wife, and my kid, all playing around and generally doing nothing. But it was doing nothing with a purpose: every twenty minutes or so I just had to pop into the kitchen and give the stock a quick skim, adjust the heat so it was just barely simmering, and generally futz around with the thing. What a glorious day.