Will you take your turkey on the trail?

Just curious. Is anyone planning to take some of the leftovers from tomorrow's grand meal and dehydrate them? If you put them in the freezer, they should be fine next summer....and it would make for an interesting meal on the trail...

Seems like it would work, no?

Hmm I will try a bit, some dried turkey added to Ramen might be good? Funny thing is Turkey is pretty cheap too! I want to figure out how to make a good trail turkey pot pie! without using a canister of fuel? I will get it down.

I have better luck rehydrating ground meats rather than sliced roasted meats. Canned items sometimes work OK, as well. Maybe the cell walls are affected by pressure cooking in the canning process. Anyway, *I* would go with something like shelf-stable packaged stuffing with added ingredients like dehydrated celery, cooked, dehydrated ground turkey, and packaged dry turkey gravy. The fat in homemade stuffing, gravy, etc., seems to interfere with drying/rehydrating, and keeping qualities. Yes, I've tried both ways. Maybe I should have made repeat attempts, but I have found some things that work for me and have stuck with them.

CM

The stuffing, mashed potatoes, and yam casserole should all dehydrate (and more importantly rehydrate) very well. However my thanksgiving meal planning doesn't produce more leftovers than I will consume in the next day or so.

Roast turkey is liable to turn into turkey jerky when dehydrated. Also, unless you are cooking low-fat, the meal is liable to turn rancid after a couple of warm days.

If you want to dehydrate turkey, cook it moist (preferably pressure-cooking) and low fat, and then grind it before dehydrating as CamperMom suggests. Take stuffing mix plus chicken bouillon cubes or powder; add hot water and oil when mixing in camp. You can dehydrate mashed sweet potatoes (leave out butter) and buy freeze-dried green beans. Of course dried cranberries are easily found. I don't know if there is such a thing as turkey gravy mix (I am not a gravy fan), but you can use a chicken gravy mix.

I am pretty sure that I've seen powdered turkey gravy in stores, notably the tall plastic containers in club stores.

Green beans dehydrate/rehydrate pretty easily. Green peas are another story entirely. Some may be fine and others remain rocks waiting to crack a tooth... Whirling the dried peas in a blender helps, if one is OK with pea pieces...

CM

Whirling the dried peas in a blender helps

So this is what those bumperstickers were talking about. I mean the ones that said:

Visualize Whirled Peas

I buy Simply Organics turkey gravy mix. It is quite tasty and easy to make (just add water)!

"Visualize Whirled Peas"

LOL!

Good one!

CM

heck, but the time I have a pouch or can of turkey or chicken, along with some stove top and idahoan mashed potatoes, I don't think I'd bother dehydrating thanksgiving dinner - it's too easy to do a pretty good facsimile from grocery store bought ingredients.. or I'm sure as good or better than I could do trying to dehydrate the real thing..

I see where you are coming from, but I'm not a huge fan of prepackaged stuffing and even a pouch weighs more than I want to carry. I MIGHT mix the ingredients I'd want in stuffing, minus fat and water and put up some portions to pack along with dehydrated cooked ground turkey or canned turkey.

If I were to plan actual cooking, as opposed to a "boil water and dump meal" (AKA Freezer Bag meal) I might consider seasoning corn bread mix with a little poultry seasoning and steam bake a corn muffin with chicken or turkey in it. Maybe I should try that for lunch one day soon before the turkey is gone...

CM