A dozen ways to skin a turkey

Or at least a dozen ways to use turkey leftovers!

On Sunday night I cooked an 18 pound turkey for dinner.  We had always planned on eating the turkey on this particular day, but thankfully some friends came over to help as well.  I'm not sure that 2 lone people have any business trying to finish off an 18 pound turkey on their own.

 Isn't that a good looking bird?

I should be - but still am - amazed at how much meat was on that bird, and I've been thinking about how many meals we're going to get out of this turkey.  Here's where we're at so far.

5 meals - Sunday night, full Thanksgiving style dinner
2 meals - Lunch on Monday; I had turkey and stuffing, DH had turkey and mashed potatoes
2 meals - Lunch on Tuesday, I had a hot turkey sandwich on ciabatta (yum!) and DH had turkey and mashed potatoes again
2 meals- Dinner on Tuesday; turkey burritos
2 meals - Lunch for both of us on Wednesday; leftover turkey burritos

That's 13 meals right there! (A baker's dozen, if you will.)  And we still have a ton of turkey left.  I'm thinking we'll get at least 6 more total meals out of it.  I for one am definitely interested in doing the hot turkey on ciabatta again, although we also talked about making California turkey clubs or turkey chili.  And of course there's always the old stand by - turkey salad sandwich.

I also made the tastiest rolls and best gravy ever.

The rolls are frozen dough balls that you can only get around the holidays.  We stocked up so that we'd have some around when we wanted them.  You have to let them rise for 5 hours, which means a lot of planning ahead, but it's so worth it.

The gravy is all of the liquids from the turkey bag pulled out with a baster (minus all of the turkey scraps that always fall off), two packets of turkey gravy seasoning and a little bit of gravy flour mixed with cold water.  It was seriously the best gravy I have ever made, and I love gravy.  It had the perfect turkey flavor, wasn't too salty, and the consistency was perfect. 

I've always found that cooking big meals like Thanksgiving isn't really that hard if you plan ahead appropriately, but I really must say - I am getting good at this!