Uses for Thanksgiving bones
If
you haven't thrown out those ham bones and turkey carcasses, you're
sitting on a gold mine! While the rest of our family fought over
leftover meat, I snagged my favorite meat remnant --- the ham
bone. I'll cook the bone up in a pot of beans today, then freeze
the result in small segments to turn into refried beans and additions
to soups. The final bare bone will go to Lucy as her
post-Thanksgiving treat.
How about those turkey
carcasses? Although I was a bit lax when we lived on storebought
birds, raising
our own broilers
this year has given me a new appreciation for eating every part of the
fowl. After picking off all of the meat, I cook the remnants in a
big pot of water all afternoon, then pour off the first round of stock
to be used as the base of soups. I used to throw out the carcass
at this point, but during my summer flurry of putting away garden
produce, I needed extra chicken stock for all those harvest
bounty soups,
and I quickly learned that you can get another batch of rich broth by
stewing the bones all over again. Don't forget to throw in a bit
of vinegar to tempt more calcium to migrate out of the bones and into
the water. After two rounds of simmering, the poultry bones are
so soft that they seem to disappear when tossed back to our chickens,
boosting the all-important calcium levels of our laying hens and giving
them a high protein fix that perks them right up.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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