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On wishbones and purple soup

Another Slice

Four days following our attempted consumption of the biggest bird we’ve ever shoved into our poor little oven, we’re still coming up with creative ways to eat the leftovers.
We turned the post-Thanksgiving sandwich tradition into competitive gaming, we used leftover bread crumbs and veggies in a Black Friday breakfast bake, we whirled frozen chunks of leftover pumpkin into thick pumpkin smoothies and, in the pièce de résistance, we used all of our remaining vegetables in a purple, yes purple, Sunday soup.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
1) You can not shove a 26-pound turkey into a 25-pound pan without major surgery. The gross jiggly neck portion will drip grease so quickly that, 15 minutes after you stick the monstrosity into your oven, your kitchen will fill with smoke. You’ll have to yank it back out, lift it from the pan, reposition it without the nifty rack that was going to save you all this trouble, and then place it back in the roaster.
2) You should not let the 20-year old college student anywhere near your meat thermometer. He will dunk it under water to zero it out, which will allow water to fill your display face, rendering it useless. You will not be sure your turkey is fully cooked until you slice into it. Human beings were not built to handle such stress.
3) All carrots used to be purple. Really. Orange carrots are actually a mutation. We learned this after we purchased a giant bunch of colorful carrots at the winter farmer’s market. Molly made a turkey out of hummus and carrots and we used the leftover carrots in our Sunday soup, which leads us to lesson four…
4) Purple carrots will turn your delicious chicken tortellini soup purple — not a vibrant Barney colored purple that will make your family want to hold hands and sing “I love you, You love me, We’re a happy family.” More like a dirty sweatshirt kind of purple that will remind your family of the time someone threw a red sock in with the whites and turned everyone’s delicates a purply grey.
5) The Christmas season really starts with the snap of the Thanksgiving wishbone.

Our Thanksgiving table yielded lots of laughs and plenty of leftovers.
We turned the bread crumbs and vegetables into this pretty breakfast bake.
Molly borrowed the recipe for this pumpkin smoothie from the The Pioneer Woman, a red-headed mother of four tall children whose blog draws roughly a billion followers a day. You’d like her stuff. We do. For this simple smoothie you just freeze blocks of leftover pumpkin purée, and blend it with milk, sugar, and cinnamon.
Vinnie stole Molly’s sandwich idea, and presented a  turkey, avocado, goat cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes and spinach during the great sandwich cook off of 2013. Molly cried fowl.
This soup looks even less appetizing in person, but it tasted great and we snuck in all the remaining vegetables — turnips, onions, spinach, tomatoes, carrots and potatoes. Even the freshly grated Parmesan cheese took on a purple hue.
These are the carrots that caused all the trouble. Look, they’re as big as my head. The giant purple one hiding in the back of the bunch is the one that caused all the trouble. We ate them with hummus, and then we chopped them into our soup.  I would not recommend the latter.
They worked off their tryptophan with a lively wishbone battle.
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