We love homemade soup especially on a rainy, cold day. Your belly starts to growl about 2 hours into the slow cooking because of the aroma that permeates our entire apartment.
We really like the idea that it’s cheap! Yep, that’s what Cheap Bastid is all about—making really good tasty and healthful food inexpensively. And the major expense of this dish is the vegetables and noodles because everything else is left-overs. In fact, I’ve got some left-over turkey noodle soup that I’m going to heat up and eat just as soon as I get done with this post.
Yesterday I wrote about making stock from a leftover turkey breast carcass. This let me make “stockcicles” or ice cubes made from the stock that I can use anytime for flavoring in soup, sauces, sautéing or gravy. Best of all, it’s free! You’re using what many people throw away to make something that you usually buy—and it tastes a lot better and has a lot less sodium.
And I used the rest of the stock—about 2 ½ cups as my soup base. Then I picked through the meat—shredding it and discarding the bones and any remaining skin. What I had left was just about a pound of turkey.
So here’s what you’re going to need:
Homemade Turkey Noodle Soup
Ingredients
- 2 cups broth or stock
- 1 lb shredded turkey meat
- 1 cup diced onion
- 1 cup diced celery
- 1 cup diced carrot
- 1 diced jalapeno (optional)
- ½ bag egg noodles (more or less depending on your taste)
- Salt, pepper, garlic and cumin
Directions
Get out your crock pot/slow cooker. Add the stock and add an equal amount of water. Bring it up to heat and a slow simmer. Add the turkey meat and let all this cook for a couple of hours.
Sample the broth! Add salt and pepper a little bit at a time. I also add garlic powder and cumin (why do I add cumin? Because we like cumin!). Remember, go easy with the spices—you can always add more, but once it’s in, you can’t take it out.
From there, I added a little over a cup each of diced onion, diced carrot, diced celery and diced jalapeno. I let that cook for a couple more hours and added 2 or 3 handsful of frozen corn.
Now about an hour before serving, toss in about half a bag of egg noodles. By now this is going to be smelling so fantastic that you’ll be drooling. Sometimes I make drop dumplings for this soup, but not this time. They’re fantastically easy to make. Instead, I sliced some French bread and lightly toasted it in the oven for dipping into the soup.
Oh man, it was fantastic. Stick to the ribs good. Silky, tasty texture—just enough spices to bring out the full flavor of the soup. And what’s best is that this was really inexpensive.
The Cheap Bastid Test: This started out as an 8 pound turkey breast. We got 3 dinners and several sandwiches from it. And we just got 2 more nights of dinner out of the soup plus multiple meals with a flavor boost from the homemade stock. That’s a bargain. And for the soup, I used the left-over carcass and meat and added about $2.50 worth of vegetables and noodles.
In today’s world, you have to stretch every dollar. It’s even better when the result of the stretching is comfort food this tasty and nourishing.
That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!
