Turkey Noodle Soup and Apple-Cranberry Crumble : Around the Kitchen Table

Here we go. Looks like it is recording. Yeah, always something to do. All right, so we're going to start cooking and it's pretty simple. Like I said, we're going to make a turkey noodle soup and we're going to make an apple cranberry crumble. And again, I apologize for those of you that signed up for this before. There's some kind of issue going on with the time setting, so I had to reschedule this and do it again. I went in to start it and it was gone. So I'm going to start with some produce as we get our soup ready. Let's move this over. Now I'm just gonna peel down some carrots. And if you guys have questions, feel free to ask any time. I will be just having some fun here, prepping up, getting ready. And soups are great to make, especially this time of the year. Well, it's not winter so much here. How long is it safe to keep turkey loafers before you make soup with them? Well, if I know they're gonna be leftovers, when I break my turkey down, they go right in the freezer. All right. I would give any kind of a cooked meat probably no longer than 7 days, and that's pushing it a little bit in my book. 5 days is pretty much the maximum for me once it's cooked. So I, like I said, I try and throw them right in the freezer as soon as I know they're going to be leftovers. And that's exactly what I did with what we're using today. It's when I cleaned the carcass down, when I was breaking that down. And I was getting little pieces of meat. I took those pieces of meat and I put them in a baggie and froze them because I knew they were soup material. They weren't necessarily big enough to be much of anything else, but they were soup material. All right, so let's grab a knife, cut them up. Okay, so I'm just going to take the tips off. And again, if you're making stocks Or if you have room in your freezer and you want to save all these little pieces, you can, and you can use them to make stock later until you have enough little vegetable ends. They also work well under meats when you roast meats, add a little flavor to the pan juices. So there's a lot of use for them. If you, uh, compost, you know, it's a good idea to put them in your composter too. This camera just a little bit going the wrong way. Oh, you know, I never ever pick the right one the first one. You know, 50% chance you think I'd have a better chance of picking the right one. All right, so I'm just going to cut these into some smaller pieces, flat sides always down so they don't wobble whenever there is a flat side. And these don't have to be perfect, we're not measuring them. So we just want to pull them together. Take my knife, tip down, and cut. And notice how I always curl my fingers in. Okay, now pulling them back, and I'm looking at that camera while I'm doing this, which could be dangerous. I felt something come a little close. All right, so there's my carrots. I'm going to take the carrots, put them in my pan here. And I'll just spill them all over, making a mess out of this. Usually I'll bring the pan right to it, which always works out a little better, especially when you cut something that's small. But it's good to see a chef screw some things up. I know, not a good idea to take my eyes off the camera, but you know, having been in the industry so long and having to watch everything that's going around on me Sometimes, if I'm careful, every now and then I can look away without a mishap. And I generally cut, like I said, pretty simply. And I'm keeping it— the only thing that ever comes into jeopardy is sometimes this thumb sticks out just a little bit too long. But as long as I'm butting up against this part of my fingers with the knife, I'm not really going to cut anything. And I can look up, but it's just this thumb. I have to remember to curl that thumb in sometimes. No, I can do it, but the rest of you shouldn't. I would not recommend that, thank you very much. Unless of course you have a cutting glove, and they sell those on Amazon, and you can put a cutting glove on your oppositional hand or your other hand that you're not holding the knife with, and you put the cutting glove on it, and then you can cut to your heart's desire looking at whatever you want. Because if you slip with a knife, you're only going to miss what you're cutting, you're not going to cut yourself. Of course, I did have one of my employees stand there with a knife one day and try to saw through it, which I had to stop him right away because you can go through it eventually if you really try hard enough. But they're to stop the accidents. And I have never been real fond of cutting gloves simply because of the condition of my hands. But, you know, and yeah, you can get them on Amazon. They come in pairs, not expensive, they're like $12 or $13 for a pair. And just look for, I don't know, just cutting gloves, I guess. And they come in different sizes. And the real trick to using those cutting gloves is make sure when you're using it, I always put a glove in and over. If it's yourself and you're not sharing it, you don't have to put one under, but definitely put one over top of it. That way you won't be washing it constantly. It won't be getting dirty. They do wash. So now the onions, I'm slicing almost all the way through. Okay, I'm gonna turn them and just cut. And you notice I always try and keep the tip of the knife down because if I'm going to cut a lot, this is going to keep me from getting real tired out. If I'm just cutting a few things and I want to chop it and have some fun with a knife, which you shouldn't, then you can lift it up. But if you're cutting a whole bag of onions in the industry, and a lot of times that's what we'll do, you have to learn to how to handle your knife. Absolutely, Michael. Thank you. I appreciate it. So let's set this on. Let me turn this on. Let me grab some oil. And we're gonna hit this with a little bit of oil. Get our soup going. And this is pretty simple. It's pretty basic for any soup. You know, we've had other soup classes.. And I've shown you how we make them. And you know, this is just basic. So I'm going to put some pepper in here. You've got your mirepoix, which is your celery, carrots, and onions. Salt and pepper it a little bit. And you know, you can always add more later, so don't get too carried away with your salt and pepper. All right, great. All right, so oil. I always heard to add cold oil to a hot pan. Cold oil to a hot pan is great. Does it really matter? Well, if I'm sautéing something, yeah, it matters. If I mean like a piece of meat, uh, if I'm just sweating out some vegetables, not really. It's, you know, it's a matter of— I always try to put the oil in first, but I don't always remember. And it's not a big deal. You just want enough oil to sauté. You don't want it to be sitting in a lot of oil. So putting it in afterwards is sometimes a better idea because you're just topping off the vegetables. You put it in beforehand, then you have a tendency to try and cover the bottom of the pan a little bit too much. And Deborah, now I'm not using garlic in this, but by all means, if you want to use garlic that's, that's fine. You know, you can go ahead and use it. And how long does an open bottle of oil last before it spoils? Well, if you keep it in the dark cabinet, away from the light, away from the heat, I've had oil for months and it hasn't gone rancid. And I always buy olive oil to cook with, extra virgin olive oil to cook with, and I actually have some corn oil in there too for baking.. But I have never had a bottle of oil spoil. If you're worried about it, buy the smaller bottles. Now, I transfer— I actually, I buy what Publix runs a lot. A lot of stores run these two-for-ones, BOGOs, which I absolutely love. Buy one, get one free. And a lot of times they'll put olive oil on sale, extra virgin. So at that point, I buy the smaller ones. Because I'm getting a gallon for the same price as I would, uh, a half a gallon, pretty much. And at a grocery store, oil is usually more expensive. I tend to buy mine at the big box stores. Does it matter if you keep oil in the fridge? Well, if it's really olive oil, it's going to congeal and it's going to get solid on you, so it's going to be harder to work with. So I would not necessarily put it in the fridge. If you want to see if the oil you bought is really olive oil, put some in there and see, because sometimes people label things and they're not really olive oil, or there's not enough olive oil. There's been a big problem in the olive oil industry, so that's always good to check out every now and then. You can Google that and you can find more information on it. So I, I wouldn't necessarily keep it in there because it's gonna get all cloudy and clunky, and you'll have to thaw it out before you use it, or if you want to scoop it. But, you know, I would use that as your main oil for anything. I'm going to turn this down a little bit. Okay, so let's— that's done. I'm just going to let that sweat. I've got it turned down to a low. I'm going to add some turkey in now, and these are just— you can see the bits and pieces of turkey. Nice. Most of it's dark meat, but again, it was an organic turkey, so even the white meat's a little bit darker than most. And there's something there I don't want in there. Just get rid of that for now. You see, you know, when I pull it off quickly while I'm doing other things, every now and then you get a piece of skin, which wouldn't hurt it, or a knuckle or something. So this is a good time to kind of check it out. Cut it up a little bit, and then we're going to add that into the pan. And remember, you can put anything you want into this soup. This is your soup, and I always stress that. Now, I always start with the mirepoix, but if you like some other vegetables, you want to put some asparagus in, some broccoli in, some spinach or other greens in, by all means, you know, add what you want to it. Soup is— it used to be made from leftovers. It was like, what do we have leftover in the house? You know, and then that's what you make soup out of. And we've gone from doing that with soup to really fine-tuning it and using all fresh ingredients for soup. But it's really, you know, let's clean out the refrigerator and make a soup. You know, in the industry, that's pretty much how we make our soups. Like, what do we have around that we need to repurpose so we don't waste food? And, you know, it's important if you're buying food not to waste it. So that's something to keep in mind. All right, so we have our turkey, vegetables are sweated down. I'm just getting a little more heat in here. Now, I, I have some turkey stock left over, uh, that I had, and I had had it in the freezer. I had cooked down some skin and some other items. So I put it in the freezer till I knew I was going to use it. So I'm going to add this. It's not going to be enough stock, but I'm going to add it. Okay, and then I have some organic chicken stock that I bought. I usually have my, uh, uh, RC Fine Foods chicken paste, but I have to order some more of that from Amazon. I let it get away from me and I ran out. So we're gonna— I had to bite the bullet and buy some liquid stock. And there's all kinds of brands. I just happened to grab Swanson. There's a lot of, you know, good brands out there. That happened to be on sale and it was organic, so I bought it. All right, so here we've got our soup basically done. All right, all we're going to have to do now is season it. If you want to throw a bay leaf in or anything else in it, you know, you can do that. Again, it's your soup. Fresh herbs, anything you want to make it pretty and to make it tasty and to make it your own. Tortellini in here is always wonderful. Buy a little package in your frozen— or in your refrigerated section where the pasta is in your supermarket. Look and see what they have. They have tortelloni and tortellini or mini raviolis. That's a nice break from just plain noodles. If you want to roast some tomatoes or throw some bits of tomatoes in here, you can. Green beans. Again, any vegetables you have hanging around. I almost bought some soy edamame. I can never say that right, to throw in there. But I figured Lisa would never eat them, so I know she's not going to eat the peas, but I like them. So I'm going to add some peas in, and I always catch grief from somebody about peas when I add them in because they don't like peas. But to me, peas are like the best thing to add for color, and I happen to like peas. I grew up eating Green Giant baby le sour peas. We used to go camping, or we used to have peas at home if we weren't— we did farm and we did grow some of our own peas, but we always turned to those too. And I love those. I learned to really eat peas. And when you're camping, sometimes you eat them cold out of the can. That, my dinty moore stew, were two of my favorites when I was a child back in the '60s, way, way back. And we'd go out and eat before I really knew better. Although I still like Dinty Moore's too. All right, so here's your soup. Soup is basically done. We're going to re-season it when we're, uh, we're ready to taste it. But I'm going to put it on the stove now. I'm going to let it simmer for an hour or two. Okay, now the noodles aren't going to go in, and I have some lovely big pieces of egg noodles here that I found at the grocery store. You can use any kind of noodles you want. You can break up spaghetti. I add red pepper to canned soup, so I think consommé— no, that's not a bad idea. You know, you just throw something else. Look in your refrigerator. What else do you have you can stretch that canned soup with? And I will never talk bad about any products because every product has a place. I had a friend that was talking about the fact she didn't have anything to make for dinner. So I said, "Have a zombie apocalypse dinner. Go get cans out of your cupboard and eat everything cold out of the cans." And she went, "I don't have any canned goods." So this is a time when the really healthy eaters need to live next door to someone who's not real healthy and has a lot of canned goods, because then you can always survive off their stuff. But anyway, back to the noodles. Any kind of noodles, any kind of pasta, pantry raid, right? Any kind of pasta that you like is good to add into it. Uh, break it up if it's long like spaghetti, uh, unless you wanna slurp up your noodles. Uh, but these are nice egg noodles. I love egg noodles and it's always a good way to use them. Like I said, tortellini, ravioli, anything like this. Now most people will add their noodles in while the soup's still cooking and this is where we run into a problem with this. The noodles. These noodles are gonna cook in 5 or 6 minutes if they take that long, maybe even a little less. So what I tell you to do is make your soup, get it all cooked the way you want it. And now this is more than I'm gonna eat, or Lisa and I are gonna eat in one sitting, so I'm gonna freeze 2 batches of it. Now if she's gonna take it to school, before she takes it to school, like when I pack her lunch up at night, you know, they break down into mush and they're just not good. So when I, when I go to set it up at Nifer, I will take the uncooked noodles. I'll make sure there's enough, a little bit extra liquid in the soup, and just put a handful of uncooked noodles into her little Tupperware container and put it in the refrigerator. It's going to soak up enough liquid that they're going to be nice firm noodles when she heats it up the next day at school. It'll be perfect. Same thing with the noodles here. I'm going to let this sit before, you know, I'll separate it before I take what I want if I'm going to eat some later, and then I'll just throw a handful of noodles in it, wait another 5 minutes, and they'll be ready to go. So add your noodles in. You know, you could cook them ahead of time, but you don't even really need to do that. Just before you go to heat, when you're heating it up, throw a handful of noodles in, whatever you think you want in it, and just let them come back to life that way. And like I said, if you're setting it up for dinner the next day, they don't even have to be cooked. They can be raw. All right, so that's it for here. Let me move this over. Got it on simmer. And now we're going to make, uh, the crumble. I think I need that. It's all over. Magic of television, I have it set up here. So this is going to be pretty easy to do. All right, I have everything here. I have all my ingredients. So let's move a few of them out of the way for now. First thing I'm going to do is cut up my apples. I have some Granny Smiths here. But you can use anything you like. I'm gonna just cut— I've cut them in half, this one already, but I'm just gonna cut out this little bit of core right there. And you can do this. I have a core, but 9 times out of 10, it never comes out in the right places. So I pretty much will just find ways to take out the core without going to too much trouble. These are nice tart apples. I have used them before and they're pretty good. I love when the fresh apples come in season. I hope this isn't too loud on this microphone. I'm gonna have to get, I think, a hanging mic to try and avoid cutting. I have it sitting on towels But sometimes it isn't enough, and this is a wood cutting board. Oh, stem. All right, so from this point I'm just going to cut them up in some chunks. They can be slices. They don't have to be peeled. If you like the peels on, by all means leave the peels on. If you're making any cider later, you can always save these bits of peels and, uh, cores and everything you have and throw in your cider with a cinnamon stick. Again, waste not, want not. If you have means to use them, and there's a good way to use them. And again, the freezer, if you have the space, is always a good place to store. Just remember to label and date your bags whenever you put stuff in there. Oh good, thanks Michael. I was listening to it the other day and it sounded a little loud, so I wasn't sure. Okay, so apples. Are done. Now let me get some brown sugar because I forgot to get it out with the other sugar. I did get some Florida Crystals organic brown sugar. You love me some Florida products. I'm going to add a little brown sugar in here, probably about a half a cup to that, or maybe 3/4 of a cup. Some cinnamon, little pinch of salt, and we're just going to mix these up. Simple as that. And you can use, uh, I almost grabbed the coconut sugar. You You can use coconut sugar if you want to, to make it a little lower on the glycemic index. And that's got a nice— this was coconut sugar would actually be good with these because it has a nice kind of caramelly flavor to it. Buy an induction countertop burner today and need new pans. Well, if you're going to buy the induction cooker on Amazon, Duxtop has a wonderful set of inexpensive pans. You can buy some really great pans that are gonna cost you a lot of money, but actually the Duxtop, the quality, this is a Duxtop and it is nice and heavy. It's well built. I, I never heard of the brand before I bought it. So, and it was an inexpensive, so it was like the cheapest sauté pan that was heavy it was made out of tri-ply. So I've been using it, and I use it even on the regular stove. I don't always just use it for induction. So you can do that, or you can just buy a couple pieces and see what you might like. I have a Burton. I don't have the Duxtop induction cooker. I have a Burton cooker, but they should be about the same. But the Duxtop Pans are excellent on Amazon and I have the sauté pan in a couple of different sizes, but I think they have a set with an 8 and a 10-inch sauté and a couple of different pots. And they're about, I think it was like $140. Actually, I'm looking for something for my niece to get her the same. So let's put the apples aside for a minute and let's make some crumble topping. I still have a little brown sugar in there, but that's okay. I'm going to use the same pan, add some brown sugar, I mean, some flour. I'm gonna add in, this is a muesli mix. I went to get some oatmeal out of the cupboard and I did not have any, but I had this muesli which has got oats in it and some raisins and some cranberries and some other things. And speaking of cranberries, I forgot to put these lovely cranberries. Oh my good, I am just not with it today. Let's get another bowl. I start talking and I forget what I'm doing. Let's go back to the apples here. Let's add the cranberries in because I have some lovely cranberries and I have some pecans because, you know, I love pecans. We were working with them yesterday. Let's put that. So, you know, again, waste not, want not. I've got cranberries, I've got pecans in the house. Let's use them too. All right, let's put my dish away. So here we go. So we've got apples, cranberries, and those are those candied cranberries. So again, I'm not wasting, but you could use plain raw cranberries. I got a little bit too much now, so I will make another one in a smaller container because I have to leave room for my crumble topping. So that's good. So I want this a little on the flat side. All right. And I have some leftover, but don't worry, I won't get— I won't get wasted. I will make another crumble. Okay, so let's go back to our topping. We have flour. I have my muesli or oatmeal and put in a little bit of sugar. Mix this all up. And now we're going to work in some butter and I'll add it as I need it. I'm going to work the flour into the butter. And what is the wattage of my Burton cooker? Uh, you know, I'll have to check on that for you because I honestly don't remember, but it was not their like super one. It wasn't the chef's model with more power. I'm thinking 800, but I could be wrong, but I will check on that. Like I said, they had one, it was like $169, and usually I go for the most expensive and, you know, the, the best or biggest they have. But in this case, you know, I don't know why I said— well, actually, it was a Christmas present for my wife, and she was disappointed when she found out it was only like $80. She thought she was buying me some $300 stovetop thing. It might be the 1800. You know, that 800 sounded right, but it's very possibly 1800. But that being said, I have never had it past 500. Okay, so it's, it's going to cook really well. So you can see I just mixed all this up and now I'm going to put this crumble topping on top. And you want to get that butter worked in nicely because that's going to really add some nice flavors and crumble crisp. Cobbler, whatever you want to call it. I think the only real difference with a cobbler is they usually use more of a cake batter kind of thing on it. Just want to work it in a little bit, and that is your topping. That is your apple crumble. Now, having fun here just chatting, we've, we've made, you know, a nice soup that'll be ready Okay, it's, it's lunchtime. You could have it for dinner tonight. Get— have us— I wouldn't have a loaf of bread because we're going to have dessert. Normally I would say have a loaf of bread with a soup. Have a salad. You have a little roll if you want and have, have your soup and then have this nice little dessert that you can pre-make ahead of time. You can put it in your refrigerator and you can bake it. You're going to only need to bake it for about maybe 35, 45 minutes. If you want to sauté the apples, you can always do that first. And if you sauté the apples up, then you can cut a little bit of the time off the baking as well that way. So rinse my hands off. And that is our apple, our apple crumble with cranberries and walnuts in it. Very simple to make. See, I still have some of the mix left over. So I will either just sauté that up or make another little pan of that and bake it. I have to make some more crumble topping for it, that's all. But you can always just eat it as well. Very tasty. Okay, so our soup is cooking. Let's bring this back for you. Soup is looking good. And as long as there's not pools of fat around here, let it be, just stir it up. But if it looks like there's too much fat, what you wanna do is just come in here and just skim it off. Just skim it off with a spoon. All right, but a lot of times, as long as you don't add too much oil, the fat that you're skimming off is coming from the stock that you made or the meats or anything else that might have been clinging. Oh, Janelle wants to come in. Let's say hi. I want you to come in. Hello. You there, Janelle? Hi, Janelle. No, she must have hit it by accident. Oh well, thanks for coming on anyway. So that's it for today's show. My favorite part is eating what's left, you know. I gotta tell you, that's usually when I do eat. I never really eat while I'm making it, but when it's done, if there's something hanging around, that's when I get to chow down a little bit. So, I mean, these apples with the cinnamon and the sugar on it are really nice. I may not make a crumble. I may just have that later on because I have enough there for the two of us. But that's what we have for today. We did our turkey noodle soup. And like I said, I'm gonna add, once it's done cooking, before I serve it, I'm gonna add a handful of the uncooked noodles to it. I'm actually gonna break this down into two so Lisa has something for lunch tomorrow. And I'll take hers, and when I put it in the refrigerator and it's all nice and cool, I'll take her portion and I'll add some uncooked noodles to it, set it back in the refrigerator, and tomorrow when she has it for lunch, they'll be all rehydrated and the noodles will be ready to go. So it'll be nice and firm noodles and you can eat well. So, you know, you always, you want to think about what you're making and when you put this stuff in. You don't want to add your noodles in while it's cooking because they'll turn to mush. If you're having another, if you want to add something different to it, go to your refrigerated section where the pasta is and buy some tortellini, some tortelloni, some little mini raviolis. You want to change this up, throw a handful of baby spinach into it, get some greens in here. But remember, your soup is made pretty much what you want to eat, and it's, it's made out of basic leftovers. Start with your mirepoix, your celery, carrots, and onions, and then add your broth in. And if you don't have any, you know, don't be afraid to buy some. They have all different kinds of broth. You can get a vegetable, a beef. They didn't have any turkey, so I did use some of my turkey broth in here. And just make yourself up a nice soup. It's it'll be a nice way to sit and enjoy some time together with someone having some soup. If you don't have a dessert, have some crusty bread and some good butter, some European butter. My favorite is Kerrygold if you're gonna go that for cooking. When I get it, I buy Plugara and I buy that by the block. So it's cheaper for me that way when I go to the restaurant store. What is a soup exactly? A soup is vegetables and broth, or broth and whatever else you want to put into it. So this is turkey vegetable soup, and I have bits of turkey left over from Thanksgiving, carrots, onions, celery. I threw some peas in for color because I like peas, and I'm gonna add some noodles in later. But you could put rice in here, you could put any other grain in here. Whatever you want. It's, you know, soup is what you make of it. So that, my friends, that is it. I will be back at 4 o'clock today, and I will be making chicken parm in bulk. I'm gonna fry up a bunch of parm. I'm gonna make a bunch of cutlets and fry them up, and I will have them ready for dinner. We're gonna have, actually have that for dinner tonight, and we'll freeze up the rest of the cutlets so I can have them a day that I don't feel like working too hard. So thank you, and And I'll see you all soon. Bye-bye from Around Our Kitchen Table.