This rich and hearty turkey stew is a perfect, heart-warming winter meal. With a thick and velvety broth and chock full of shredded turkey, peas and potatoes, it’ll quickly become a fast favorite.

It’s officially soup season, y’all! And there’s nothing I love more on a cold winter’s day than a satisfyingly chunky stew; turkey in this case, with a flavorful base with a hint of tomato and tons of tender dark meat and vegetables.

The weeks and months after Thanksgiving are a special time, not because of Christmas and New Year, but rather because this when you can easily find turkey thighs and legs in the butcher’s case at the grocery store. Hallelujah.

Seriously, don’t try to track down turkey in July; with the exception of ground turkey or maybe the odd frozen butterball, you will not find turkey thighs or legs anywhere.

Even in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, chances are you’ll only find whole, previously-frozen birds and breasts tied and ready to roast.

But once Thanksgiving has come and gone, they’ve got to do something with all the surplus turkeys, right? So the butchers break down the leftover birds and sell them off piecemeal. And it is a delicious situation, indeed.

This stew comes straight from Taylor’s brain. He first made it last year, roughly jotting down the recipe in our notebook under the heading “Best #!*$-ing Turkey Soup, Ever.”

We devoured it and promptly forgot about it.

Until this past fall, when we filled up said notebook and, before breaking open the fresh, new recipe notebook (is there anything better than a new notebook? I think not) we flipped back through the old recipes just in case there were any orphaned recipes that deserved a second look. And there were a handful of them, some dismal failures we ultimately abandoned (I’m looking at you, persimmon bread) but others, like this turkey stew, were recipes that really deserved to be shared.

But when we decided to refine and share it, we were faced with a surprising inability to find a single turkey thigh anywhere in this city.

So we sat on the recipe for a few more months, checking the meat counter every week just in case, maybe, this would be the week they’d have turkey thighs.

Finally, the week after Thanksgiving, our wish came true. Of course, at that point we were dead tired of turkey, so we put it off for yet another two weeks.

But finally. Here we are. Almost two years in the making. Taylor’s Best #!*$-ing Turkey Soup, Ever (or, as I’m calling it in my more SEO and family-friendly post title, Taylor’s Ultimate Turkey Stew).

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