So what are your favorite uses for thanksgiving leftovers?
Anything goes including hot turkey sammies, turkey soup, turkey tetrazzini, etc., with extra points for creativity.
I will start with two of my favorites:
Pulled Turkey in a KC style bbq sauce with molasses, tomato and cider vinegar. Makes great sammies on a toasted kaiser, and it’s also easy to freeze in for later.
Turkey Tikka Masala with curry paste, extra ginger, garlic, onion, tomato and heavy cream. I usually have leftover cauliflower too, so that goes into Aloo Gobi.
So what’s happening to the day two leftovers at your place?
I gave all the white meat to my guests to take home, and I’ve been feeding the dark meat to the cats, LOL. I’m not a big turkey fan. My husband sometimes shreds leftover meat in gravy and tops it with stuffing, then bakes it into a sort of Thanksgiving casserole. The tikka masala actually sounds pretty good - perhaps I’ll take the remaining dark meat off the bones and do that with it. Indian spices should be strong enough to cover up the flavor of turkey!
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
3
Well, we don’t have a Thanksgiving in the UK, but turkey forms the main Christmas meal for most Britons.
In this household, there are two main “use ups”.
First is a simple turkey sandwich, which is guaranteed to appear for Boxing Day lunch. You need a reasonably good quality white bread. Supermarket “white sliced” isn’t good enough. But you don’t want anything too fancy. Butter it. Add turkey and any leftover stuffing. Add mango chutney. Eat
The other is based on a Delia Smith recipe from her 1990 Christmas book. Fry an onion and some mushrooms in butter, then add some flour. Add some turkey stock (or chicken) and stir till you’ve a thick sauce. Add parsley, cream and brandy and allow everything to cool. Then add turkey and ham (you could cook some bacon instead of the ham) Roll out a sheet of puff pastry to 30cm square and dollop the turkey mix into the centre. Moisten the edge of the pastry then bring opposite corners into the centre and pinch all the edges - so you’ve a square with the pinched edges in the shape of a cross. Bakes for about 30 minutes at 220.
If there’s still anything left, it goes into the freezer to reappear as a curry some weeks later. A fairly basic quick sauce that more usually appears with bean curry in this house - onion, garlic, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, garam masala, cayenne, tin of tomatoes. Sauce cooks down for 15 minutes or so, then the turkey goes in to warm through.
The first question I ask on Black Friday is: “How much dressing is left?” Critically important to my mental welfare because I need an open faced, turkey sandwich on Rye–smothered in gravy; and a large hunk of dressing, again smothered in gravy for a second night’s dinner. If the mashed potatoes didn’t make it past Thanksgiving, I can live with that.
The unused neck and Gizzards are always set aside for Turkey Rice soup in the first week of December.
If you do this, keep in mind that Harters is in the UK, so that’s 220C.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
12
Indeed, it is. I forget that America is the only country to still use fahrenheit.
And please don’t ask me to start thinking again in pounds and ounces! I’ve got a handful of recipes that are 30+ years old and whenever I cook them I have to check what it means in metric.
A tradition with us. Sometime in the week after Thanksgiving, my dear wife makes her Turkey Rice Soup. It appeared last night for dinner and was served with crusty rolls that I was allowed to smear with butter.
Former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis is now a very together, active octogenarian. After he mentioned, in a 2015 interview, that he makes turkey soup from the carcasses folks he knows save for him, he wound up with dozens from strangers - and was happy to get these. http://search.aol.com/aol/search?enabled_terms=&s_it=wscreen50-bb-ac&q=dukakis+turkey&s_qt=ac
In our family the principal leftovers were turkey, stuffing and gravy. My mother’s solution to all this was to chop the meat, mix it with the stuffing and gravy, and call it Turkey Hash. This was why we were all very happy when there were lots of leftovers.
Nowadays we don’t have enough nearby “orphans” to host a TG gathering, Mrs. O has gone vegetarian anyway, and we have our celebration on Friday with my brother, my niece, and her husband at a restaurant between our town and theirs. But that leaves me with no leftovers … so this year I roasted a couple of thighs, made two quarts of dressing and some gravy, and rolled it all into enough turkey hash to have with eggs for about eight breakfasts. Mrs. O never liked that hash anyway, but when I told my brother about it he said, “Aww, you went right to the best part, didn’t you?”
Skipped TG this year … but in previous years and future it’s always the same
IMO … less is more
TG pics 2012 & 2013
soup
sandwich
stuffing and eggs (diced turkey)
