Thanksgiving is a time of cherished traditions in our family. We decorate our table with items that graced my grandmother's Thanksgiving table when I was a child. We prepare a foods for a feast that has varied so little over the decades that even young children in the family who have experienced only four or five Thanksgivings can recite the traditional family menu. We eat the main part of our dinner in the early afternoon and eat our dessert in the evening.

All is tradition, including afternoon activities between the main meal and dessert: while the men migrate to the living room for naps and conversation, the women gather around the kitchen table to bone the turkey.

Very little goes to waste in the turkey boning process. White meat goes in one container. Dark meat goes in another container. Bones, skin and fat, commonly discarded in some households, go into a large pot for making turkey broth. The flavorful broth that results from boiling the bones, skin, and fat will be defatted, divided, and frozen for later use as the base for soups that warm the body during the winter and bring to mind recollections of the year's harvest feast.

To make our turkey broth, we add enough water to the bone pot to completely cover the bones. We add salt or vinegar to the water to extract more minerals from the bones into the water* and bring the contents of the pot to a boil. We then turn the heat down to let the pot simmer for an hour or so.

Once the simmering time is complete, we strain the bones, skin, and solid fat from the broth, discard the solids, and refrigerate the broth. Refrigeration causes the melted fat to rise to the top of the broth and solidify, making it easy to remove. The flavor components from the skin and fat remain in the broth, but the calorie-laden, artery-clogging fat itself is thus removed. The skimmed broth is ready to be used in soup or to be divided into smaller portions and frozen for later use.

Thanksgiving is not the only time that we have the necessary elements to produce soup stock. During the rest of the year, we make chicken broth, ham broth, and beef broth in exactly the same way as turkey broth, except that we do not add salt to the water when making ham broth. Additionally, when cooking boneless cuts of meat, we reserve meat drippings that are not used for gravy, defat them, and freeze them to use later as soup stock. With various homemade meat stocks stored in the freezer throughout the year, it is necessary to label the containers with the type of stock and the date it was made it so that we aren't surprised with chicken stock when we thought we were using ham stock for making beans!

The obvious advantage of making homemade soup stock is that we never have to worry about whether or not they are gluten free. What began as a holiday tradition in my family has become a particularly useful skill for those of us who are celiacs.

* If using salt, we use about 1 teaspoon of salt for every 4 cups of water. When we prefer not to use salt, such as when preparing broth for someone on a low-salt diet, we use 1½ teaspoons of vinegar for every 4 cups of water.