Thanksgiving is over and you’ve seen all the turkey you want to see for a while. You had a huge Thanksgiving feast with turkey and all the trimmings. Then late that night you had a great turkey sandwich, with perhaps a side of dressing. On Friday you had another turkey sandwich, with some hot mustard to spice it up a bit. Now it’s Saturday. You just opened the refrigerator door and there sits that turkey carcass with just enough meat on it that you think you can’t throw it away. But what to do?
Some years at Thanksgiving we have had a guest who liked to pick the turkey bones clean; those tidbits could then be made into a sandwich or salad — not an ounce was wasted. But he won’t be here this year and I have been imagining that carcass looking back at me from the refrigerator shelf. I remember that years ago I had a good recipe for something called Turkey Carcass Soup — a terrible name, of course, but it was quite good. So I began the search for the recipe. After going through all my old hand-written, or fading-newspaper copy recipes, I looked through 50 or 60 cookbooks: no turkey carcass soup. So I did what any enlightened six-year-old would do: I went to the Internet and sure enough, there I found the turkey carcass soup. This recipe has added a couple of ingredients that I did not have in the earlier soup (cabbage and tomatoes) but the addition of those vegetables made this a robust, healthy dish, and one without the guilt of those Thanksgiving calories. Try it. You’ll like it.
Turkey Carcass Soup (we must come up with a better name: suggestions?)
1 turkey carcass
4 quarts water
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon cracked black pepper
¼ teaspoon poultry seasoning
1 pinch dried thyme
6 small potatoes, diced
4 large carrots, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 large onion
1 ½ cups shredded cabbage
1 28-oz can whole tomatoes, chopped
½ cup uncooked barley
Simmer the turkey carcass in 4 quarts water until meat falls off bone, about one hour. Remove carcass and chop any remaining meat. Strain broth into clean pot. Add turkey, bring to a boil, then add all ingredients and cook one hour. Remove bay leaf.
Serve this hearty soup with some good French bread and a nice white wine, and you have a perfect Saturday-after-Thanksgiving meal. Now for the football games …

-Joni Woolf, a writer and editor, now lives in Schley County, having moved from her home in Macon several years ago. Contact her at indigojoni@windstream.net.