Thanksgiving Leftover
66 recipes found
Pavo al Pastor (Sweet and Smoky Shredded Turkey)
The iconic tacos al pastor (shepherd’s style tacos) — made and eaten across Mexico and in the US — are normally made with adobo-marinated pork steaks, flame-kissed on a vertical spit called a trompo and served with grilled pineapple and onion on corn tortillas. In this recipe, which takes advantage of leftover turkey, canned chipotles in adobo evoke the flavor of al pastor’s spicy adobo sauce, while the chipotles’ smokiness mimics the spit-roasted pork. Extra al pastor sauce can be used like a barbecue sauce to flavor cooked shredded meats like chicken or pork, or as a marinade for meat before cooking. For plant-based tacos, toss the sauce with roasted vegetables or brush over raw cauliflower, winter or summer squash, eggplant or mushrooms and roast or grill until charred and tender.
Birria de Pavo (Turkey Birria)
Originally, birria was developed as a way to tame tough and gamey goat meat by marinating it in a rich and spicy adobo sauce then slow cooking it until it was falling off the bones. The meat was shredded and served in bowls with the braising liquid (called consomé) ladled over top. The consomé-infused meat was put into tortillas with cilantro, onion and salsa and eaten with more consomé on the side or used as a dipping sauce. Because this recipe takes advantage of leftover turkey that is already cooked, the carcass is used to make a quick consomé flavored with canned fire roasted tomatoes, dried chiles and spices. Add the shredded turkey at the end to warm it up and let it soak up all the flavor. For the salsa, use leftover cranberry sauce; homemade or canned both work great. If using canned and you have a choice between whole-berry and jellied, choose the whole-berry sauce — the salsa will have even more texture.
Turkey Kimchi Pancakes
These crispy but delicate fritters are a riff on pajeon, savory Korean pancakes that can include vegetables (like these vegetable pajeon), meat or seafood (like these scallion pancakes with squid). This version, inspired by Thanksgiving, features leftover turkey and fresh green beans, along with common pajeon ingredients like scallions and kimchi. The ingredients are bound by a light batter using flour, egg and water and then fried. Serve the pancakes right away, while hot and crunchy, but if you happen to have any left, they can be reheated in the oven at 350 degrees on a baking sheet to recrisp.
Cranberry Grilled Cheese
Somehow, there is always leftover cranberry sauce after all of the other Thanksgiving leftovers have disappeared. The classic grilled cheese sandwich comes to the rescue, welcoming any cranberry sauce you have on hand into its warm, melty embrace. A meat-free alternative to the traditional Thanksgiving leftover sandwich, this cranberry sauce grilled cheese thrives with mild or sharp Cheddar, though any cheese is welcomed here. Adding in a layer of Dijon mustard and of course, a few slices of turkey, are also great ideas.
Matty Matheson’s Leftover Turkey Clubhouse Sandwich
Eating a club sandwich at a diner is a delight. The presentation has a very royal vibe. Even a bad club sandwich is special. I like to add pickle and cheese, so this is kind of a club deluxe. I also like mayo on the side because sometimes I want to spread just a little extra on top of a bite like a bad boy. Every once in a while, I'll make the clubhouse sandwich from my book, “Soups, Salads, Sandwiches,” with Thanksgiving leftovers like I do here. I eat it with a side of stuffing and some gravy, which is a huge flex. A club sandwich with side fries and gravy is all-time one of the greatest meals in the world.
Turkey Stuffing Meatballs
The classic combo of turkey and stuffing, all rolled into one. These turkey meatballs use cubed bread as their binder. The bread is joined by olive oil, chicken stock, minced vegetables and seasonings to make them extra moist and flavorful. The meatballs come together much faster and easier than roasting a stuffed turkey, which makes them an easy win for when you have all the Thanksgiving leftovers except for turkey. Perfect for more than just Thanksgiving, these meatballs can be served with gravy and cranberry sauce, stuffed inside of a sandwich, on top of a salad, or as an appetizer. Feel free to swap ground turkey with chicken or pork and the bread cubes with packaged herb or cornbread stuffing or even any leftover stuffing if you have it.
Cranberries and Cream
Inspired by British fool, swirl the last spoonful of Thanksgiving cranberry sauce into whipped heavy cream and Greek yogurt for a creamy, cooling relief after the big meal. For a little crunch, dunk into it with gingersnaps, or use the cranberries and cream in place of plain whipped cream atop slices of pumpkin, apple or pecan pie for a tart contrast to the sweet pie. Because yogurt adds structure to the whipped cream, the mixture can be made ahead, covered and refrigerated for up to 4 hours, and if you want to make this another night and don’t have cranberry sauce, substitute cherry or raspberry preserves.
Sweet Potato Pound Cake
Glazed with a kind of pecan-studded sauce, this sweet potato pound cake is the perfect marriage of two Southern staples. The cake is tender, buttery, warmly spiced and loaded with fall flavor from canned sweet potatoes, but you could also put your Thanksgiving leftovers to use here and use mashed candied yams or sweet potatoes. They’ll lend every bite richness and gentle sweetness.
Potato Pete’s Potato Scones
These scones are surprisingly decadent for a recipe devised in wartime Britain as a way to stretch rations of flour and butter. As adapted by the historian Eleanor Barnett from a 1940s pamphlet produced and published by the Ministry of Food, it uses up leftover mashed potatoes and lets you get by with about half the amounts of flour and butter that a typical scone recipe might require. There’s less of a rise, since potatoes lack gluten and thus can’t create the long, elastic strands of protein that trap air and bring buoyancy. But the extra starch gives the scones softness and a delightfully tender crumb. Out of a limited batch of ingredients, you 12 scones, enough to create 6 scone sandwiches with your choice of filling: a sweet slather of cocoa powder, sugar, butter and a dash of milk, evoking cake frosting, or a quick savory slaw of shredded cabbage and carrots, livened up by onion chutney.
Turkey, Farro and Chickpea Soup
Filled with spices and nubby with grains and beans, this easy soup is a satisfying way to use up as much of your leftover Thanksgiving turkey as you’re willing to spare from future sandwiches. Pearled or semi-pearled farro will soften in about half an hour, but you can use other grains here as long as you adjust the cooking time. White rice will be ready in 15 to 20 minutes, while brown rice and barley need about 45 minutes to an hour. (You might need to add a little water if the liquid level in the pot reduces too much.) And if you want to make this aromatic soup when you don’t have leftover turkey on hand, cooked chicken is a perfect substitute.
Thanksgiving Leftovers Hot Pockets
Wrapping up Thanksgiving leftovers in store-bought pizza dough and baking it all together creates a hand-held pielike treat that’s somewhere between a calzone and one of those Costco chicken bakes. This recipe calls for stuffing, roasted sweet potatoes, turkey and cranberry sauce, but it would work equally well with leftover green bean casserole, mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts (chopped or sliced into small pieces) or squash. If it tastes good together on your Thanksgiving plate, it’ll taste good baked into a pocket. You can use homemade, store-bought or canned pizza dough here, but homemade or store-bought will give you the best texture and flavor.
Chicken-Tarragon Pot Pie
This recipe, which is adapted from “Julia and Jacques at Home” by Julia Child and Jacques Pépin and was featured in a New York Times article about roast chicken, makes delicious use of leftovers (it would be excellent with the Thanksgiving turkey remainders as well). It is rich, but packed with vegetables. You can substitute dried tarragon for fresh, but use less than a tablespoon, and season to taste.
Bang Bang Turkey
This fast-assembled salad, perfect for Thanksgiving leftovers, is nothing more than shredded turkey under a satay-like sauce of peanut butter, chile bean and Chinese vinegar, with some shredded lettuce and chopped cucumbers. It’s gloriously wolfable and easy as well.
Turkey and Apple Sandwiches With Maple Mayonnaise
Here’s a new fall classic for a young student’s lunch box: a fresh sandwich of turkey and apple, bound together with mayonnaise spiked with maple syrup. For a kick, swirl a little Sriracha sauce into the mayonnaise.
Instant Pot Congee
You can use any leftover roasted meat to flavor this mild, comforting congee, which is delicately seasoned with white pepper. Adapted from Liyan Chen of New Jersey, this recipe is a perfect use for all the bits and pieces of your leftover Thanksgiving turkey (or chicken or duck during the rest of the year). If you’d like to, add the shredded lettuce just before serving so it retains some of its texture. Then garnish the top with any combination of scallions, ginger, soy sauce or chile sauce that pleases you. Note that congee will thicken as it cools, but you can thin it out again with a little water or stock.
Turkey Pho
A play on the Vietnamese chicken noodle soup, this clear broth, paired with rice noodles and flavored with charred onions and ginger, star anise, brown sugar and fish sauce, comes served with a platter of fresh garnishes. But this is more than your basic noodle soup: A spritz of lime at the end adds some tang, and mung beans and Thai basil a crunchy bite.
Roasted Turkey Ramen
On Thanksgiving night, with dinner pillaged and in ruins, Joshua Mangerson picks off the remaining meat from the turkey carcass, submerges it in chicken stock and lets it simmer. The next day, turkey leftovers are transformed into turkey ramen, with mushrooms, scallions and a six-minute egg in each bowl. The rich, cloudy broth is an ode to the Strongbow Inn, the turkey restaurant that Mr. Mangerson’s great-grandmother opened in 1940 on the family turkey farm in Valparaiso, Ind. Mr. Mangerson, who worked summers at Strongbow as a teenager, makes his own chicken stock first, with chicken backs and necks collected over a summer of grilling, but you can use store-bought stock and still get a strong boost of flavor. The recipe may look labor-intensive, but “I wouldn’t want anyone to be scared away,” he says. “It’s not difficult to do. It just takes time, and you have to care.”
Turkey Silog (Garlic Fried Rice With Eggs)
Silog, rice bathed in lots of garlic and crowned with a runny egg, is a hearty and essential part of any Filipino breakfast, and it comes together very quickly. For Chad and Chase Valencia, brothers and owners of the Filipino restaurant Lasa, in Los Angeles, the best time to make silog is the morning after Thanksgiving, when they top it with seared leftover turkey (or ham), and gravy to moisten the bits of rice. You're going to have to plan ahead for this recipe, as it’s best made with day-old rice; freshly made rice won't get as crisp in the pan. And don't be intimidated by the amount of garlic here — it all mellows out, while still providing a potent punch. Chad notes that this dish will work in almost any nonstick pan, except for a steel or aluminum-bottomed pan; you could even use a well-seasoned cast-iron pan or wok.
Filipino-Style Breakfast Sandwiches
Breakfast is hugely important in Filipino culture, a legacy of the country’s rich agricultural past, when farmworkers ate large morning meals to get through the day. Accordingly, the morning after Thanksgiving, the brothers Chad and Chase Valencia — who own the Filipino restaurant Lasa in Los Angeles's Chinatown — make breakfast sandwiches for their family out of leftover asado (a salty-sour pork dish), ham or turkey. The sandwiches are endlessly customizable: Chase mixes the asado and its accompanying sauce into the eggs, like a scramble, to become the base of the sandwich, while Chad crowns his with a fried egg. But the constants are the queso de bola, a nutty Filipino cheese (similar to Edam cheese) served during the holidays that melts elegantly atop the meat, and pan de sal, a slightly squishy, yeasted roll whose sweetness stands up to all the savory components of the sandwich. Both the cheese and the pan de sal are readily available at many Asian grocery stores, and well worth getting to make superior sandwiches.
Best Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich
The sandwich you make with all the prized leftovers the day after Thanksgiving might be even better than the main event. Assembling this leftover Thanksgiving sandwich is easy, but the details matter. The white and dark turkey meat each get special love and attention: The breast is warmed in butter, while the dark meat is shredded, then warmed in gravy. This club ditches the usual third slice of bread for a slab of crisp, fried stuffing instead. When heating the stuffing, make sure your pan is good and hot so the stuffing fries up fast without falling apart in the skillet. A generous swipe of cranberry mayo brings the whole thing together.
Stuffing Dumpling Soup
Smash it up with eggs and flour, and leftover stuffing transforms into a tender dumpling dough. A simple bone broth made from your turkey carcass creates a savory base, which you then load up with kale and sweet potatoes for a hearty, healthy post-Thanksgiving meal. If you prefer to roll your dumplings into visually perfect balls, leave out the 1/3 cup turkey stock for a sturdier dough, but if you don’t mind a rustic look, that additional moisture ensures a lighter dumpling.
Stuffing Panzanella With Cranberry Vinaigrette
The best way to reheat leftover stuffing? Press it into a pan, cut it into cubes and fry it in oil until crisp. The exterior browns and caramelizes, while the inside remains tender and creamy, just like the best bread pudding. This trick works best with stuffing made from smaller pieces of bread, but even if you don’t end up with perfect cubes, they will still be delicious. Serve them warm, on top of a fresh, raw salad tossed in a tangy cranberry-mustard vinaigrette, with fried pepitas running throughout for even more crunch. If you use a homemade cranberry sauce for the dressing, you may want to sweeten it with a touch of honey.
Turkey Potpie
No one knows when people started making pies, but they were common in medieval Middle Eastern and European cooking. “The Oxford Companion to Food” speculates that the English word may come from the word “magpie,” because magpies collect random items in the way a pie often houses varied ingredients. It’s appropriate, then, that this pie is here to accommodate your Thanksgiving leftovers: turkey, of course, but also leftover roasted squash or sautéed mushrooms in place of peas, chop up half a rutabaga instead of carrot and celery, or a stray leek or shallot instead of onion. Any fresh soft herbs can go in the biscuit topping. For an even simpler version, use canned biscuits arranged on top of the filling as the crust, or defrosted puff pastry with a vent cut in the middle. For a more assertive flavor, use the larger amount of mustard.
Turkey BBQ Sandwiches With Pickles and Slaw
Most turkey sandwiches are best made with slices of white meat stacked neatly between two slices of bread. Not this one. With a saucy, spicy filling piled onto a hamburger bun, it’s perfect for dark meat and any scraps you may have leftover from the carcass. The cabbage slaw adds crispness and tang to the soft turkey, and bread-and-butter pickles give the sandwich a touch of sweetness. If you don’t have leftover turkey in your refrigerator, this recipe works just as well with the meat torn off a rotisserie chicken.