I was a guest for Thanksgiving, but came home with a generous serving of leftovers (except pie, boo hoo). We had both turkey and ham, but there was less turkey left over so I declined and asked for just ham. Ham is a treat when you're living alone because it's not something most of us cook for one. I had some leftover fresh salmon, so ate that with the leftovers and saved the ham to have several mornings with my breakfast. Ate the last of everything last night for dinner. It was wonderful to not have to cook meals for a couple of days!

Most of the leftover turkey was made into a double batch of pot pie filling and frozen on Friday. We had a hot turkey sandwiches Friday and Saturday to use up the remaining gravy and taters. The wings and a leg were left out for the critters. Zero leftovers remaining.

I made Mongolian Beef last night with chicken egg rolls.

We were sent home with some leftovers that are gone now. One item was most of a lemon meringue pie from Marie Callender’s someone purchased at the restaurant. Just wanted to say that pie was about as pathetic as it gets with imitation lemon flavoring and crust like crumbling cardboard. I threw the entire thing out. Annoying they screw it up that badly. I checked online…almost $20 for nothing!😡 LOL, I should’ve known better when our daughter handed it to me with, ”Maybe dad will eat this.”🥴

I don't mind left overs at all. But I do wonder why people make far too much in the first place. Same with restaurants. Why give people so much food they take some home? So much waste.

I'm sitting here snacking on Snyders Honey Mustard Pretzels pieces. Lunch will be Italian Shepherds pie. Lots of mozzarella cheese in the middle. I made it with the left over mashed potatoes.

Edited to add: floral....I cook something every day. Making extra saves me tons of time AND money. The turkey was .79cents a lb! The russet potatoes were .97cents/5 lbs! I'll be unthawing leftovers and making dishes for the next 4 weeks. We also got a FREE turkey. We're delivering it tomorrow to a friend at the gym with a BIG family. He's on disability, so we help whenever we can.

(Safeway Grocery Store had a deal, where if you spent $100 you get a FREE turkey, your choice of size)

nicole - I used to do the 'buy a ham get a turkey free' thing at my grocer and we'd save the ham for Christmas. I stopped doing that when we started to buy a whole hog every year or so from a farmer friend and had the ham sliced into steaks and cured. We always had several pounds of ham left over when we did a whole ham at Christmas and I had to find creative ways to use it up. Now I can just pull out a ham steak whenever needed.

Moderate carbs this morning. Stuffing about enough to be a goodly slice of bread, zapped with melty cheese. It was really good, and satisfying! I've never done that before.

So, Floral, not everybody is a perfect determiner of portion sizes for a variety of eaters. Restaurants (other than ultra high end) want you to feel satisfied and like you've gotten value for your money. Other than exotics, food is generally the least expense at a restaurant (or college cafeteria, etc.). How do you set a portion size that will satisfy a big guy who runs hot and a small, quiet woman, and a small woman who eats like a bird (i.e., several times it's weight) or the skinny gamer guy who aets a ton of snacks but never much at once? You go for a kind of average portion that makes sense logistically and financially, and if some are pleased to take leftovers home, that's great. For those who like it, it's another reason to return.

I've been warned time and again that the proportion of bones to flesh of smaller turkeys is a false economy., so I chose my turkey accordingly and froze half, as I expected to do. It's actually more cost effective than a smaller bird. I don't make gravy for Passover turkey, but serve pan juices from the braise. I made sure to make enough ahead for the potential guest list, so still have a third in the freezer. It'll keep. It's very high in collagen, more like turkey jell-o when not heated, so there's' some leftover from the meal as well, since it's so rich. I couldn't figure out how to scale the stuffing recipe, so just made it as normal, knowing that it freezes well. Having all these things in the freezer is a good thing! Sometimes one just doesn't want to cook. And I have two freezers. There's enough left over of the rest to prove that everyone had enough, and have some nutritious food to eat while recovering. Many foods actually taste better as leftovers than they do just cooked, so it's win-win.

None of this is to say that your point of view isn't valid. It's just that this is one of those different strokes for different folks kinds of things.

I roasted one-half of a bone-in turkey breast and immediately portioned and froze all but portions for three meals. It was a small breast, but yielded seven 85g portions. So, I was able to enjoy hot turkey on Thanksgiving and cold turkey on a salad for the two days following. The other portions can be thawed/used as desired. I don't make any of the traditional side dishes so no leftovers of those to consider.

I made turkey dumpling soup and a turkey pot pie from the bones and leftover veggies but still have enough turkey and dressing for another couple days because two of my dtrs forgot their leftovers they’d packaged themselves. My freezer is full and hub and I can’t eat another turkey dinner, at least not for a while. Thing is, I have no idea what we will eat tonight!

If the daughters are too far to fetch their portions, are there some neighbors who'd love home cooked leftovers? A bachelor at work? I'm voting for salad, tonight. If it gets colder, maybe sausages (and salad).

I dislike leftovers and have become a master at cooking enough for one meal, maybe 2, because my SO does not mind leftovers and for meals like Thanksgiving he wants them at least twice. But I do not care for them at all. I made a small batch of each side so there wasn't any wasted, enough for me to have one portion and he 2, and any meat we had leftover after that was chopped up and distributed amongst our 4 dogs as a treat.

Today, for a pre-sundown meal ,I made a baby lettuce salad with some crunchies and succotash instead of other amenities. That was really good, but I was nibblish and craving sweet, so I ate a little sliver of weird pumpkin pie that was all that was left by the minions. Then I started to be really hungry, and ate a few slices of turkey right out of the fridge. Good turkey :) By then the sun had set..

Ha - I enjoyed the same Thanksgiving dinner for 2 more nights, and there's still a small casserole of extra unbaked dressing that I just remembered 🙂

I like most leftovers too - esp. from holiday meals. It's so nice not to have to cook every day. Last night I made a turkey & veg. pie with what was left of the dark meat and gravy, and that was dinner again tonight. Next is turkey tetrazinni with the white meat.

I made a pumpkin (actually red kuri squash) pie on Friday - just finishing the last piece now...

Good suggestions, plllog, but daughters are each 90 minutes away in opposite directions, and the neighbors were offering things to us, so no dice.

I, too, craved a salad tonight and had a delicious simple salad of romaine, tomato, onion, garlic, olives, with olive oil and vinegar dressing and garlic Bread. mmmm

We've been enjoying the leftovers in a very ad hoc way . I haven't craved a 'composed plate' of leftovers this year..., I did have a mini hot turkey sandwich, and thoroughly enjoyed an odd bite of dressing and mashed potatoes now and then with my share of a dollop of gravy..., and nibbled at the delicious apple tart our friend had made... I did a minimum amount of cranberry sauce but this is the year we could have used more :)) the gravy is gone now, so that leaves too many mashed potatoes, I guess I'm thinking about one more decadent situation where we could turn those into waffles or even just panfried, yummm - pass on any ideas to doll those up!.

We didn't do a pumpkin pie for the first time in forever, but I do have a pumpkin in the house that's catching my eye, and sweet potatoes I opted out of , but those hopefully will hold for a nice period of time.

I am feeling in the mood to cook again this week - tonight is turkey soup, using up the last of it in which I'm hoping to create light and lemony compared to the very rich situation it's been (with my bday on Tuesday and our anniversary last week, it's been a bit much, in a good way)

But the rest of the week will be movin' on from what Samin Nosrat hilariously called brown, sweet, soft, too rich or too dry, too salty or too bland , no offense intended, she has a heart of gold it seems to me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/dining/how-to-improve-thanksgiving-dinner.html

I love Samin, she was on Splendid Table last week and made me laugh .

I have hatch chiles in the freezer, roasted and peeled and waiting to become rellenos, those are sounding tasty with a piquant tomatillo sauce and black beans along with salsa fresca, our homemade sour cream and a topping of cotija cheese. Tomorrow will be my first shopping day in a week ! It's been a fabulous holiday weekend, and Happy Cooking to everybody ! I hope you all are well, you are very generous and kind people I come each day to help me feel good

Happy Birthday! And the rest...

I don't have much mashed potatoes left, but I keep thinking they need eggs. Like choux. So I did a little search. Mashed potato puffs is a thing!

“But I do wonder why people make far too much in the first place.”

Floral, would you like for me to tell you about my MIL? Too bad, I’m going to tell you anyway. She’s got health issues, everything is too much for her but she does it anyway. OVERdoes it anyway, that is. Let’s talk about Thanksgiving, since that is what we’re talking about after all:

We had talked about staying at my inlaws‘ house, arriving after dinner (“after” clearly stated) on Wednesday as we usually do, to avoid Thanksgiving Day traffic. Coming “after dinner” to her means she’s going to have dinner prepared. Since there’s only so much she can do in a day, she cooks ahead of time. So the full turkey was roasted and stuffing came out of the oven on Tuesday.

I think I forgot to mention that she doesn’t actually host Thanksgiving, we were just sleeping there. As it turned out, we couldn’t go Wednesday after all, showed up on Thursday. We all went to dinner and my inlaws headed back home before we did that night. We arrived after 10pm, to find turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, some other vegetable, and three pies waiting for us on the counter. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t hungry and much to MIL’s disappointment we didn’t eat. All went back in the fridge.

On Friday we left with as few ”leftovers” as we could politely manage. Which is to say, a lot. No one felt like another turkey dinner on Friday so leftovers had to wait. Saturday we make turkey sandwiches for lunch. Enough turkey for one day. Sunday I counted the days since Tuesday’s cooking. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Save for the pies, everything went in the garbage.

What a waste. A huge meal that never needed to be cooked in the first place.

It’s been like this with most visits for decades. I try to refuse food but eventually give in because it’s not worth fighting good intentions. It’s just so darned wasteful!

I will eat leftovers once, maybe twice, and my girls love to have leftovers, as do the grandkids. So I make too much on purpose, turkey and ham, two kinds of stuffing, a big Pane Bianco plus dinner rolls, two pies and a cake and a trifle. Everyone takes leftovers home and brings containers with which to do that. One Granddaughter loves mashed potatoes more than anything else, so I make extra and she takes a large container of them home. Her sister wants the cake, so it goes with her. Everyone likes ham except me, so I make a big ham and everyone takes some home for sandwiches, while I keep the remains of the smaller turkey. It's all carefully planned and none of it gets wasted other than an occasional spoonful of cranberry sauce.

I had leftover turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy on Sunday night and a cold turkey sandwich for breakfast today, our meal was on Saturday. Elery had cushaw pie for breakfast, and I'm about over the turkey. It'll make treats for one of the grand-dogs and at 39 cents a pound it's cheaper than dog food.

Annie

I love leftovers! Especially when they get random. Sliced pork tenderloin and mashed potato sandwiches on toast.

The day after Thanksgiving, we had turkey bacon sandwiches and I made a yummy turkey soup which I froze most of it. We are not stuffing people, so the leftovers went into the trash. DD took some turkey home also. Not much goes to waste around here.

Now that it’s just the two of us, we love leftovers, too! I often deliberately make enough for two meals, one for tonight, the other for the day after tomorrow. Not everything is as delicious on Day Two as it is on Day One, so I’m careful about what I make as ”planned over,” and I use the airfryer to reheat some things. Can’t beat it!

I’m pretty sure most restaurant food could be considered “leftovers” kept warm or cold and heated as necessary.

I've never thought of it as "leftovers" but my mother always said, "If you can cook a chicken, you can cook two!" Father would expertly wrap a crinckle pan with freezer paper, and we had a manual defrost freezer, with coil shelves, to best freeze and hold the food. To a certain extent, I did consider the Thanksgiving turkey as meal plus leftovers, but since I knew I'd only get half the turkey eaten, it really is like Mother's make two!

I ended up lazily doing a mashed potato 'souffle' - thanks for that inspiration about adding eggs to the leftover mash, pllog

4 egg yolks, parm and gruyere, spinach and cilantro, and lemon juice (to about 2 1/2 cups mashed potatoes. Folded in beaten egg whites, and baked. All in the spirit of using things up.

And a boring but nourishing boiled veg dish of carrots, broccoli and shallots, all of which needed using. Dare I say it was transformed enough to be fresh and tasty. Anyway, end of our leftover saga

I had a lot of ambitions for today, mostly involving eggs. Lat62, that's lovely!

It ended up that I had a lot of stuff to do, so only accomplished one. I call it "Cranberry Rice Bread Pudding" on the labels for the freezer. :) This isn't a recipe, it's just the only way I can explain it.

All the breads that came out of the freezer for the stuffing but didn't make it into the bowl, torn and fit nicely into the blue EH casserole (a useful gift from a friend of my mother's)

One cup of never were great chow mein crunchies from the otherwise good quality ingredients local Chinese restaurant.

3 cups of cooked rice from the same place (they give us far more than we can consume).

12 eggs

1.5 cups each of half and half and cream (my milk had gone sour and people keep saying that the pasteurized milk nowadays doesn't sour, it just spoils. I grew up baking with sour milk, and it seemed like sour milk to me, but I talked myself out of it, since I don't know who will be eating it.)

Penzey's Ethiopian, my favorite (cayenne red pepper, garlic, ginger, fenugreek, cardamom, cumin, black pepper, allspice, turmeric, cloves, Ceylon cinnamon and coriander )

Extra cardamom, black pepper plus mace.

3 cups of organic cranberries (one bag), sorted and rolled in white sugar

4 small handfuls commercially sliced almonds

Toasted mixed bread crumbs

Avocado oil mist spray on the dish, and on top to keep the breadcrumbs nice.

All but the berries and nuts soaked under weight, then layered with the cranberries and nuts in the dish. Topped with the bread crumbs left over from toasting the bread for the stuffing.

It's really good. :) I was surprised. I was also surprised at how much custad the rice soaked up. I should have made more but I'd have to resort to canned goat milk. It was sufficient. The rice and breadcrumbs provide a lot of texture. The almonds aren't very noticeable. It's portioned and chilling to go in the freezer tomorrow.

That looks fabulous! The ethiopian spice mixture is something I'll copy for sure, mainly I need to get cardamom in the house again as I ran out a couple months ago just as I learned how to use it - we had some from India that was green and way more delicious. .

Thanks for the description and ideas - I want to use cranberries more, I'm sure that added a great note to the dish. something to look forward to through the winter!

We have ordered takeout sushi for dinner tonight, so much for my energy to turn a corner and cook this week - that's okay though, just a change of pace for one night to give the poor kitchen a chance to rest, haha .