Saturday, November 28, 2009

Maximize Your Thanksgiving Leftovers with Leftover Recipes [Recipes]

Maximize Your Thanksgiving Leftovers with Leftover Recipes [Recipes]: From LifeHacker

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and you've got a pile of leftovers. It's time to take a look at how you can maximize the meals you can make from your leftovers, preferably with the least amount of effort.
Photo by Roland.
Last year we shared a few leftover recipes and now we're back to share a few more. The absolute easiest method of course is to simply throw servings of your leftovers on the plate and heat them back up. If you love a good Thanksgiving meal you can't go wrong with a basic reheat. That said, we've gathered up a few basic recipes here for you to mix up your left overs.
Open-Face Turkey Sandwiches: The open-face turkey sandwich is a staple in the leftover playbook. Take a thick slice of bread—some people put a light layer of mayonnaise with a sprinkling of salt and pepper here—mound it up with turkey, pour some gravy over it, and heat the whole thing up in a microwave or toaster oven. You can always go easy on the gravy to minimize the mess and slap another piece on top if you've got a deep seated distrust of an open-face sandwich.
Turkey Dumplings: Dumplings are filling and the recipe is about as simple as it gets. You'll need cooked turkey, all purpose flour, and a package of biscuit dough. Cook the turkey in water until a broth forms, drop in some hunks of biscuit dough, and you're done. You can check out the recipe here.
Pilgrim Pie: Rene Lynch, experimenting with her leftovers, saw that she had almost all the ingredients for a shepherd pie. All the ingredients save for the crust, that is. With a little kitchen ingenuity and some sautéd onions and flour she made a simple dish out of leftover cooked vegetables, diced turkey, and mashed potatoes. You can read more about it here.
Turkey Soup: Turkey soup has a moderate number of ingredients but if you already prepared a Thanksgiving meal the chances of you having all of them on hand is pretty high. Prep for the soup is a bunch of chopping and dicing and then tossing it all in a pot. With enough leftover turkey and a big enough pot you can make quite a batch. You can check out the recipe here.
Turkey, Chestnut, and Barley Soup: If you're in the mood for a heartier soup than a simple turkey broth and turkey mix can provide, this turkey and barley soup is plenty hearty. You can make it using a can of broth or use the carcass leftover from yesterday's festivities. You can check out the recipe here.
Grilled Turkey and Apple Sandwiches: The recipe is actually for chicken sandwiches but turkey is a great stand in. You can grill it in a skillet but it cooks great in a grill press. Flavorful and easy to make, it's a nice way to make leftovers seem less like leftovers. See the recipe here.
Our suggestions should get you started on mixing up your leftovers, but it's certainly not a conclusive list of ways to turn your turkey day leftovers into something fresh and tasty. Let's hear about your favorite leftover recipes in the comments below.






No comments:

Post a Comment