A turkey....

Why not just roast the whole thing, and Jack it up once cooked? Or was that the plan and I misinterpreted it?

You could do a nice korma style curry with it. Gently fry some onions, add a tim of tomatoes, watered down puree, or you can buy freeze dried tomato powder which you just mix with water. Stir it all together, leaving out the cooked turkey. Add turmeric, cumin, ginger, and optionally cayenne or chilli depending on how hot you like it, stir it all till it's nice and blended. Add a tim of coconut milk, heat down low and keep stirring. Finally add some of the cooked turkey and let it sit in the hot but not boiling sauce for a few minutes to allow the sauce to warm it through and for the flavours to blend. Have some of it for tea, and freeze the rest. You can adjust all the flavouring to suit your taste.

When I do a creamy curry, a good tip is to take the opportunity to get rid of any overripe bananas you have in. You know the ones, they're not technically rotten, but they're soft with big black bits in. Bust them up and add them to a curry for the last few minutes. They break right down and their flavour and sweetness intensifies but without being overpowering. Coupled with ginger they give a lingering aromatic sweet after taste to the curry.

 

A very good idea to chop the carcass into pieces to make it more manageable and sensible to turn into meals.

If you can chop it whilst frozen (an axe comes to mind), the different parts can have various uses.

The crown: a fabulous Sunday roast when, first thawed properly, then flavoured and roasted. A centrepiece and obviously the leftovers will come in handy afterwards for further batch cooking and freezing. A vegan friend is an ecofriendly dinner choice! (Disclaimer- you'll get more meat leftovers when catering to a vegan group. By no means did I suggest anything even remotely pointing towards consuming your vegan friends, unless they are cows of course. In a bovine meaning of the word, not colloquial. )

The legs and wings require different cooking times, but if you are in for getting a stash of meat for further cooking, you could also consider boiling the lot in a big pot on the stove and then harvesting the meat and chucking the bones and scraps back into the pot to make a superb stock.

Any veg and even fruit cast offs (carrot tops, cabbage cores, celery wooden bits, cauliflower stalks, apple cores...) will add to the flavour of the stock, the longer it can simmer the better it will be. If the oven is on, stick the pot in there to simmer in the cooling down heat.

The legs will take around an hour to cook in broth but the wings a lot less so should be lifted out first.

And finally, the skin off the boiled parts is brilliant when gently cooked in its own fat and used as a bacon substitute. The stock will also form a layer of fat on the surface when allowed to cool, the fat is great for frying and keeps well in those small, awkward sized containers everybody has in their cupboards.

The turkey will give lovely meals all through the winter However, it is very sensible to consider the most energy efficient way to use it. Using the oven will have a cost, as will using the stove or the freezer. Batch cooking sounds sensible but if it means a lot of energy usage in preparation and the in freezing and subsequential re-heating, so it might not be so efficient after all.

Sorry about the long reply, personally I'm just now calculating the pros and cons of my cooking habits to reduce the costs so am rather passionate about both the food and the cost