Food Friday - Adventures in Crock Potting

For this Food Friday I will be sharing my first real adventure in cooking with a crock pot.  I received a 5Q one for Christmas (so exciting) and accidentally left it at home when I traveled back up to Orlando.  My sister luckily goes to school up here so she brought it up for me.

We had a Publix turkey dinner for our "christmas" dinner and when it was fullly heated/cooked the bag was opened and juice started crazy waterfall pouring out of the bag.  My Mom is not the best gravy maker and had already bought jar gravy for those that wanted some, so I declared the turkey juice was MINE!  The bf gratefully helped to separate the juice into two Tupperware containers (the whole time thinking I was crazy for wanting it).  Regardless of what he thought, my grand plan was to use the juice as a base for a turkey soup!

Fast-forward to this past weekend and I had a grocery list of all of the ingredients I wanted to add to my soup.

I had squash, zucchini, celery, sweet onion, stewed tomatoes (still in their full form) turkey tenderloin, italian green beans, vegetable stock, the frozen turkey stock, and a home grown carrot from the bf's parents garden.

Frozen turkey juice close up!

I chopped everything up to about the same sizes.

Yes this is a homegrown carrot.  Very delicious!

I heated up the turkey juice on the stove so that when I put it in the crock pot it would be ready to go.  As I was pouring the pot of juice in I realized I probably should have strained it... but I had already scrapped off the top layer of fat before I froze then.  So the more little turkey pieces the better.


I dumped all of the veggies in (at that point realizing I might have gone overboard).

I cut the turkey into chunks and cooked them almost all of the way through in a pan on the stove.

They were dumped into the crock pot too.  I tasted the broth and realized it was super salty so I added in some veggie stock, garlic powder, pepper, onion powder and set the crock pot to Heat for 3 hours.

After a while I just had to check on it so I lifted the lid

and saw....

At this point I felt it was time to add in the stewed tomatoes.  Now that is probably not a very common item to have in a soup but my Memere always made her chicken noodle soup (which my friends have tested and it does have cold healing abilities) with a can of whole stewed tomatoes.  The tomatoes were always my favorite part of the soup.  Cutting them in half in your bowl to see the red juice seep out into the rest of the bowl... yummy.

I stirred it around and let it cook some more.

After a while I pulled the lid off again (I know I know I am not supposed to have to do that) to stir and peek and the soup looked perfect.

 The last thing I added was a strained can of italian green beans.  We left for Curtis Earth Trivia with the soup on warm just to finish it up.

We came home to an apartment that smelt almost exactly like my Memere's chicken noodle soup.  Which in and of itself made me feel happy and successful.

I made myself wait a WHOLE day before I ate the soup.  Made the bf have it for dinner and I must say it was very wonderful (even though he thought it tasted too much like veggies and not enough like turkey).

Chicken noodle soup for the bf will have to be next since he "suffered" through this one without too much complaining ;)...