Turkey Soup

We cooked a turkey over the weekend, mainly to get it out of our freezer, but also because we had family in town and figured it would be best to cook it with a few extra eaters on hand. Even though it was "only" a 13-pounder, we have lots of leftovers.

I thrive on variety, so I've been attempting to find some good recipes for leftover turkey. I just can't handle the same thing more than about 2 days in a row! Also, thanks to a suggestion from the man of the house, I've started trying new recipes in manageable portions (due to some disappointing flops on a large scale...). This has been very helpful to me. I hate throwing food out, and I really hate throwing food out because I can't stomach it even though the recipe seemed promising!

Anyway, a friend gave me some homemade bread & recommended having it with soup, so I took her up on it! I found a recipe that suggested adding beef broth to turkey soup, so I tried that out, too.

I'm not a huge soup person, but I thought this was AMAZING!

I used some OLD cannery soup mix, mainly to try using it up, but you could alternately use rice or pasta (just decrease the cooking time by a lot!). In fact, with pasta, I would probably omit the first hour of simmering (below) and add noodles a few minutes after everything else.

Turkey Soup

1/2 cup LDS cannery soup mix (contains alphabet macaroni, rice, split peas, lentils, dehydrated onions) (Do they even sell this anymore? I can't find any information online.)
5 cups water
2 tsp chicken bouillon
1 tsp beef soup base
**Alternately, use chicken stock and beef stock and decrease water proportionately**
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1 cup cubed cooked turkey
1/2 tsp dried dill
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp dried parsley
1 tsp dehydrated onions
salt and pepper to taste

1. Combine soup mix, water, chicken bouillon and beef soup base in a large saucepan over medium-high heat until boiling.
2. Cover and reduce heat to maintain a simmer for about one hour.
3. Add celery, carrots, turkey, and spices. Cover and continue to simmer for 30 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Add additional water as needed if too much is boiling off, or if flavor of broth is too strong.
4. Remove bay leaf and serve with heavily buttered, warm homemade bread.