Using Holiday Leftovers
I love leftovers. Often times, foods get better and better with time. This is true of items that are marinated, such as three bean salad, or other salads where the juices blend even more with time, such as a fresh fruit salad squirted with plenty of lime juice. The day-after open faced turkey sandwich with hot gravy, along with oven-heated stuffing and all the cold salads always seem to be even more delicious than the actual holiday meal. Savor them, look forward to them, and create an atmosphere in your home that fosters this zeal of the ongoing bounty that holiday meals bring, because all too often, we citizens of the United States in particular do not appreciate the access that we have to anything and everything imaginable. This access is a great privilege, and we should use the opportunities that holiday gatherings offer to express our gratitude toward our lucky position in the world, where left-overs can be enjoyed, while so many others do not have these opportunities.
Foods that are so laboriously cooked for a holiday meal can usually also be used for many other diverse meals. Soups, stews, and casseroles are custom-made for tossing in leftover meats and vegetables. "Fancy" omelets or scrambled eggs also are great ways to utilize bits of chopped meats and vegetables to spice up the breakfast menu.
Another great use for leftovers are quesadillas, which can be easily prepared by buttering one side of the proper amount of flour tortillas and then, one at a time, frying the buttered side until starting to brown, flipping each tortilla over, putting your favorite kind of shredded cheese and other items that you want to heat on half of each tortilla, letting the cheese melt a bit, then folding the empty half over and browning both those sides. Spoonfuls of mashed or baked potatoes, seasoned to taste, are wonderful stuffings, as are pieces of leftover meat and vegetables. Anything goes! The finished quesadillas can be kept warm under a cloth napkin. Just before serving, if you like, carefully open them and add fresh ingredients such as shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, and onions.
Leftover meats can also be made into cold salads, with mayonnaise, chopped celery, salt and pepper, and different herb blends. I like tarragon in my turkey or chicken salad. These salads are not necessarily destined to be sandwiched between two pieces of bread, as they are nice toppings for toasted bagel halves, or atop a large lettuce salad. This makes a great after-holiday meal that is light, healthful, and a welcome change from all the heavy holiday eating. Prepare salads on individual plates, arranging the vegetables pleasantly over the beds of lettuce, and add a scoop of cold meat salad, or pieces of leftover meats and cheeses.
Leftover bread can be cut into small squares and baked with a bit of butter into crotons or put in the blender and ground into bread crumbs that can be frozen. Mashed or baked potatoes can be used for quesadillas, as I described, or, using the equivalent of about four potatoes, blended with a bit of chopped onions, two eggs, three tablespoons of flour, and salt and pepper, and then fried in oil or butter by the flattened spoonful into potato pancakes for another breakfast item one morning. Another use for leftover cooked potatoes is a Swiss dish that my husband makes, called Rosti. He's the expert, but I think that he fries onion and garlic in a large non-stick frying pan, then mixes in the grated, cooked potatoes along with some grated cheese (swiss, of course). He doesn't stir the extra-large potato patty, so that it gets a wonderful brown crust on the bottom. He uses a large plate to flip the whole thing over, so that both sides end up with a beautiful brown crust.
Cooked meats can always be frozen, if your family is truly growing weary of having to eat left-overs for so many days following the holidays. The key to using all that food is variety, and with the internet, so many recipes from around the world are easily available. Get creative. Adapt what you have on hand to different recipes, mix cultural flavors in. Or find a family who is in need, or a soup kitchen, or another organization that would appreciate the donation. Throwing food away is a terrible waste, but with a bit of ingenuity, maybe some research, and reasoned thought about how much you and your family will realistically eat, it can usually be avoided.
