What to do with those Thanksgiving leftovers

The feast is over and our bellies are full, and perhaps we ate a little too much but oh it was so tasty. However, in a couple of days we’ll be as weary of Thanksgiving food as our non-US members are of hearing about our feast day. Very soon we’ll be standing and staring into the refrigerator wondering what to do with all that turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes. 

The Washington Post has a few ideas to put those leftovers to good use, including turkey tortilla soup and turkey stroganoff. They’ve partnered with Dorie Greenspan to come up with Next-day turkey and cranberry-Sriracha strata (pictured above), a twist that will make a delicious breakfast or brunch dish this weekend. 

Martha Stewart offers 40 different recipes to make with your Thanksgiving leftovers. The list features everything from curries to sandwiches, plus a handful of soups and some tantalizing potato croquettes. I hope I have enough leftover mashed potatoes, but if not it’s easy to make more, since I purchased a lot of potatoes in anticipation of a larger crowd than I actually ended up hosting. 

That bring us to another leftover conundrum. In addition to the actual leftover dishes, we probably have a surfeit of ingredients that were purchased “just in case”. In our case, that means extra potatoes plus a bunch of parsley that remained untouched (I forgot to put it in the stuffing). Maybe you bought some squash to use as decoration that now could be eaten, or you grabbed a few extra bags of cranberries since they were on sale. That happened to The NYT’s Julia Moskin, who provides us with a number of ways to use these extra ingredients.