Hi, I'm Tom.
Welcome to Eat for a Week.
I'm going to show you a recipe that you can cook and it should last you about a week.
And it should be pretty cost effective.
Today we're going to be making a, or I'm going to be making a turkey stew.
So I've got six fresh potatoes here. I'm just going to wash up and peel real quick.
Once the potatoes have been peeled, I'll put them in a bowl of water.
It helps keep them from oxidizing.
Sometimes you get a little nasty brown spot like that underneath the peel.
Just keep peeling away until it's gone.
Now the potatoes are peeled.
Still in peeling mode, clean up some carrots.
Potatoes and carrots cleaned up.
Now it's time to get to chopping some stuff up.
Alright, you just want to cut up the potatoes into, I don't know, one inch-ish chunks.
Put that back and cut them more or less into cubes.
So you've got good bite-size chunks of potatoes.
Put these potato pieces back into the bowl of water.
Same thing with your carrot.
And I'm just throwing the carrots into the same bowl that the potatoes are in,
because they're all really going to go into the pot at the same time.
I usually like to have three parts potato to two parts carrot or something like that if I can.
Next task, onions.
I'm using three tonight.
Don't have to be real fancy about this.
Next thing you need is some garlic.
Peeling garlic can be a pain in the butt.
Quick little trick that I learned while watching various cooking shows.
You just take a piece of garlic, take your knife, put it on like that, and smack it.
And it feels usually come right off.
I'm just putting them in with the onions because they're going to go in at the same time.
I do believe that our prep work here is done.
Where's the turkey?
The turkey's right here.
Turkey thighs is what I've got here.
The first thing I want to do is heat up the pot.
About a medium, little under medium maybe.
Just get a little olive oil going.
Add a butter.
Butter, oil.
We're going to go ahead and season up this turkey.
A little salt and pepper.
You want this to be good and hot because what we're going to do is sear the outside of the turkey.
Just a nice caramelization going on there.
Alright, things are bubbling.
I'm going to put this turkey in there.
Just get it in there.
And let it do its thing for a little bit.
You want to get a good nice brown coloring on each side.
I put the skin side down because you want that to get crispy.
Now we're browning the other side.
It's golden brown.
Alright, I think that's right.
Yeah.
Pot full of olive oil, some butter, and turkey drippings.
You can see all this brown crap on the bottom of the pot.
Yeah, you want that.
We want to keep that because that's flavor.
Into the hot olive oil, butter, turkey drippings, and brown crap on the bottom of the pot.
I'm going to dump the garlic and onions.
If you want to salt and pepper the...
I like to salt and pepper with every step.
Juices will start coming out of these onions and the garlic a little bit.
And that will help you scrape up all that brown stuff off the bottom.
Alright, these are just about there.
You can see I scrape away the onions.
Brown stuff's all off the bottom of the pot.
I always want to get these potatoes and carrots in here.
Take a look at this. How good does this look?
What I want to do is get that turkey back in there.
Because basically, we're getting to the easy part.
Because the rest of this is just so hard, isn't it?
Now, let's get water in here.
So I want to add enough water to pretty much cover everything.
Add some seasonings.
Got some parsley flakes.
A dash of garlic salt.
A dash of onion salt.
A dash of celery salt.
Ground yellow mustard.
Plain black pepper.
A dash of allspice.
Or two. Yeah, we'll do three.
Worcestershire sauce.
A tablespoon, two, something like that.
A tablespoon and a half.
And bay leaf.
I'm going to go ahead and add four.
That's what we're looking for.
Now we want to crank this up to high and get it up to a boil.
Let's come to a boil.
We're going to turn it back to a little below medium.
And now we ignore this for 45 minutes or so at least.
Definitely the longer it goes, the better it's going to be.
You do want to come and stir it once in a while, maybe every 15, 20 minutes.
I'm going to go ahead and set a timer for 45 minutes.
Because that, at best, I think, is going to be when it's ready for the next step.
It could even go longer.
This is what it should look like for a while.
Nice gentle bubbly.
Bubbly action going on.
Smells great.
Give it a good stir.
Now one way to see if it's ready is to pierce the potatoes with a knife.
And if the knife goes in easily and even better if it just drops the potato right back off,
you know the potatoes are pretty much cooked.
I want to make sure it tastes good.
It's a little bland.
It actually needs salt.
I'm taking out about a cup of the broth.
I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons of flour to this and then whisk it together until it's nice and smooth.
I'm going to make sure and get this into the stew and mix that up real well.
It's been about another half an hour.
It is time to shred the turkey.
I'm going to take the turkey out, set it on a plate, and just break it up into bite-sized pieces.
Take your shredded up turkey, put it back in the pot.
We can go ahead and start our topping.
Instant stuffing mix.
I got turkey flavor.
8 cents.
Follow the directions on the box.
Put it on the oven to broil.
Instant stuffing.
Good stuff.
Well, not as good as mom's, but it'll do.
Now the box says at this point fluff it with a fork.
That's an unnecessary stuff.
If you're going to just have the stuffing as a side dish, you might want to do that and make it fluffier.
What I'm doing is moving it into this baking dish, spread it into an even layer.
Under the broiler.
You do want to still keep an eye on this stuffing that is, because you don't want it to burn.
You just want it to dry a little bit, get crispy and brown on top.
I think that's good.
And I think we're done.
Here's how this works.
Lay it up a nice big bowl full of the stew.
Cut yourself out a chunk of this stuffing and you float it right on top.
This is what you got.
Thanks.
See you next time.
