Thanksgiving Leftovers: Five Recipes That Start With Cold Turkey
"Friday food, not Thursday food. Every recipe here begins with cooked turkey already sitting in the fridge, and none of them ask you to cook a bird."
Notes From Behind the Steering Wheel
The leftovers are the part of Thanksgiving nobody plans and everybody ends up dealing with. There is half a bird, a container of stuffing that has gone solid, gravy with a skin on it, and four days before anyone wants to look at it again.
This list has one entry condition and it is strict: the recipe has to start with meat that is already cooked. Nothing here roasts anything. Two of them are sandwiches, because that is honestly what happens to most of it. The other three are the dishes that take the last of it and turn it into a meal you would have made on purpose.
Two of them were written for chicken and work with turkey without a single change, and we say so rather than pretending we wrote them for this. Cooked meat is cooked meat once it is shredded, and neither recipe browns it anyway.
"The cold one. It rebuilds the entire plate between two slices of bread: turkey, stuffing, pearl onions and cranberry relish on one side, mashed turnip on the other. Press every layer flat as you build or it falls apart at the first cut."
"The hot one, and the only recipe here that also solves the stuffing. It gets pressed into thin patties and griddled crisp, which is more than reheating has ever done for it. Let the first side set a full minute before flipping."
"Written for chicken, works with turkey unchanged, and it is the shortest route from a container of shreds back to a plate of dinner. One dish, biscuits baked straight on top of the gravy, thirty-five minutes."
"Swap the chicken for turkey and change nothing else. The recipe never browns the meat anyway, it only folds it into a gravy built in a saucepan, and that gravy is a much better home for dry white meat than a microwave is."
"The end of the road. It feeds ten, it is better the next day, and the shredded meat only goes in for the last half hour. That timing is exactly what keeps three-day-old turkey from cooking down into threads."
Other Collections From the Truck
Same kitchen, different occasion. Every list here was written on its own, none of them from a template.
- Halloween Cookies Without a Single Cookie Cutter
- Halloween Treats and Snacks That Are Not Cookies
- Thanksgiving Appetizers That Never Fight the Turkey for the Oven
- Thanksgiving Sides: The Five That Earn Their Plate Space
- Thanksgiving Desserts for People Who Are Already Full
- Christmas Appetizers for a Two-Hour Arrival
- Christmas Dinner Ideas: Five Mains That Carry a Whole Table
- Game Day Food for an Ordinary Sunday
- Super Bowl Snacks You Finish Before Kickoff