I know I promised you guys this post about making gravy from home made turkey stock in my post about cooking the Thanksgiving turkey this year and here it is. A little late, but exactly one week after Thanksgiving seems to have nice timing, no? Anyway, this one was pretty simple. The one thing I was tasked with before heading to Ohio was making the gravy. I had just seen Michael Ruhlman post his recipe online and figure he was a good guy to work off of. I didn’t know anything about turkey stock, but I had just finished making a ton of chicken and beef and figured that poultry is poultry so I took about a dozen or so frozen cubes with me.
But then, I got tasked with cooking the turkey and saw that, next to the recipe for the bird in my mom’s Martha Stewart cookbook was a recipe for making turkey stock that only took about 45 minutes. It fit in with my turkey timeline, so I whipped it up! Like with the turkey post, I don’t have the recipe in front of me, but it was pretty simple. I cooked a leek, stalk of celery and onion in some butter. Once that was done, I added about 7 cups of water (I think) and all the giblets but the liver. I got that boiling and then simmered for 45 minutes. When that was done, I decided not to chop up the remaining giblets for the gravy thinking it might freak people out and discarded all the solids.
In the meantime, while not doing my other turkey duties, I trimmed the fat off the liver and gave it a good chop. Once that was done, I cooked the pieces in butter and set aside for later. Those pieces went back into the stock and eventually into the gravy. When it came time to make the gravy, the process was pretty simple. I had exactly the amount of turkey stock thanks to Martha’s recipe and didn’t have to deviate from Ruhlman’s recipe at all. My wife helped me figure out the seasoning at the very end with salt and lemon juice and then we were good to go!
I didn’t tell the family until afterwards that the chunks int he gravy happened to be liver and no one seemed to mind when I informed them after the fact. All in all, it turned out to not only be tasty food, but it was gratifying to know I was able to use pieces of the bird that a lot of people just throw away. I hope they added deeper flavors, but even if not, it’s cool to use all the buffalo sometime, you know?
Pop Poppa 