A Monstrous Turkey!!

Last week is an absolute blur in my mind.  Between a Cross Country banquet that my husband and I were in charge of and my many hours working on counting election ballots, I can't quite remember what we ate last week.  I do know that we ate at the cross country banquet and also ate leftovers from it. There were nights that both my husband and son were gone so I ate a simple meal of fried egg sandwiches with a salad.  I love fried egg sandwiches.  What we ate, was what we had on hand.

Today I decided that I will have a daily quick post that let's everyone know what we had for dinner from my food in the pantry and freezer.

Last week when I was picking up a few groceries, I came across a great turkey sale - whole turkeys at 39 cents a lb.  When I rummaged through the frozen food bin, there were mostly 12 lb. turkeys.  I wanted a turkey that weighed around 15 to 18 lbs.  When I asked one of the high school kids that was working at the grocery store if they had any bigger turkeys, he said he would check.  He was gone for quite a while and when he returned he was carrying a 22 1/2 lb. turkey.  This kid was so excited that he had found a "big" turkey for me.  Well, I didn't want one that big, but I decided I didn't want to let that kid down so I bought it.

I thawed that turkey and on Friday night I roasted it, let the meat cool and then I proceeded to slice the turkey meat and put it in one pan.  I took the turkey meat that you pull off in pieces and chunks and put it into another pan and then I poured the broth to cool in a third pan.  When everything was cooled down, I refrigerated everything.  We ate off of the leftovers for sandwiches for two days and I then froze the sliced pieces in meal portions and added a little broth to each package.  I took the smaller pieces of meat and packaged them in 4 cup portions for casseroles and then I froze the broth for soup.  I ended up with close to 6 meal sized packages of sliced meats and 3 packages of meat for casseroles.  I had about 6 cups of broth for soup.  Not bad for a total cost of $8.50.

With the temp jobs that I worked, I have earned around $270 net and that will pay the balance on my son's Senior pictures. Now I can get back to concentrating on my family and home.  While I enjoyed my temp jobs, I am happy to be home and be able to start working on cleaning and decluttering my house.  

Oh, and I will be working on winterizing our house in ways that I have never done before.  It will be interesting and I will share what I am going to do later on this week.  The weather man has said it is going to be a bad winter and another weather man said it was going to be a mild winter.  Living in Iowa means it could go either way in a matter of hours, so I want to make sure that all of that expensive heat stays in our home to keep us warm and doesn't escape through any leaks.