Cooking Up Turkey Soup for a Cold

After a visit to family in West Virginia over New Year's, Beth and I both came back with the sniffles, an unfortunate side effect of spending the holiday with a family of teachers and young children, both of which seem to bring home every single bug floating around.  You know that bit about chicken soup helping treat a cold?  I'm hoping turkey soup works similarly, because that's what I've got cooking at the moment.

Back at Christmas, I saved the stripped turkey carcass from my holiday dinner, freezing it along with a portion of turkey meat and gravy for future use.  As with just about any set of bones and related cuttings, it's a fairly simple matter to cook up a stock--basically a broth, but so much better due to the gelatin proteins so-contained.  Even nicer is the wonderful aroma of turkey that fills the house as the stock cooks down at just under a simmer for hours on end.  That stock then serves as the flavorful base for a soup; cooked up with some diced onions, celery, carrots, some pasta, and some of the leftover turkey meat.

I'm looking forward to a bowl already, and hope it helps clear up this cold that much more quickly!  Though I've had worse colds (and have my fingers crossed that the worst part of this one has passed; I'm now in day six of knowing I was sick), this one has been particularly annoying coming when it has, right before Beth's mom and friend Joy come to visit us (last time they were here, incidentally, I had a nasty cold, too).