The Challenge of Leftovers

For Thanksgiving, I cooked a 12 lb turkey. There were only two of us, so there are now, as expected, leftovers.

The challenge becomes what to do with several pounds of leftover turkey meat.

(We also had leftover pumpkin and mincemeat pies, but it's pretty easy to determine what to do with those. Just requires alot of whipped cream.)

Yesterday, the first Day after T-Day, we made plates with leftover turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans and spanish olives. We just about killed the stuffing. We definitely killed the cranberry sauce and green beans. The olives can keep a bit longer. They're in a brine--who knows how long they've been pickled, so a few more days won't hurt them at all.

We re-located our activities from Steady Eddie's apartment to mine because I have to re-organize my desk (the result of the possiblity of a couple of money-generating projets...woo-hoo!) and pack away my summer clothing (hot pink beaded t-shirts just won't cut it when it's 20 degrees outside). So we packed up some of the turkey and some of the pie.

I have a very easy recepie for chicken pot pie which can be easily modified for turkey--just add turkey rather than chicken. It's the recepie on the back of the Bisquick box, so the top of the potpie comes out more like a biscuit than a crust. I can add a bit of dill or rosemary to the batter and give it a little extra kick if I want.

But there's still turkey-on-the-carcass back at Steady Eddie's. What to do with that? Soup? Turkey A La King? Turkey Tetrazzini--kind of like the Stouffer's entree?

I'm very fond ofCooking.com and their variety of recipes--from the fancy to no-frills you can find it there. I found a great roast chicken recipe there awhile back that survived the small modification of not using a piece of parchment between the chicken and the veggies in the bottom of the roaster. The parchment is meant to absorb the chicken fat, but I figured a little bit of chicken fat wouldn't hurt the veggies one bit.

So I went looking for turkey recipes. The site was taking a bit of time to load, and I figured I wasn't the only one with a mass of leftover turkey to deal with. There weren't any recipes specifically for leftovery turkey--you have to kind of figure out which ones might be for the leftovers. Turkey and Green Bean casserole was one of the first to catch my eye--then again, I was a little green beaned out from thanksgiving dinner. (there's something strange going on with Green Giant frozen green beans...since when are green beans a bright kelly green??)

There was no A La King recipie, so I figured that one was out of vogue. After all, the idea of making turkey a la king crept into my consciousness from hazy childhood memories, so I figure that it's one of those old 50's/60's Comfort Food recipes that's become a culinary faux pas...

There's such a bias against Comfort Food these days...and I'm a real Comfort Food person. I enjoy cooking it and eating it. Esp. for guys. I love when they get that down-home feeling from something I've made that reminds them of mom or gradmom. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I still think one of the avenues to a man's heart is thru his stomach. (there are others, but this essay isn't about those...)

I am, though, not in a dysfunctional about comfort food--and it's a shame I feel the need to qualify my love of comfort food. This happens because, nowadays, if you say you like comfort food, there's the intimation that you are using food to "medicate" yourself, or as a substitute for engaging in life--or any other pop psych Oprah endorsed negative analysis of behavior you want to spin. So, let me put it this way: just because I enjoy cooking a big, delicious macaroni and cheese casserole (from my own recipe) doesn't mean I'm going to sit down with a big wooden spoon, eat the whole thing myself, and then devise some stupid ritual to make myself feel good about ralphing it up again.

Why eat something like that alone? If I can't share what I've cooked, what's the point?

Geeze! When did we get so angry about both "comfort" *and* "food"??? When did we decide it was just this side of Godliness to eat raw broccoli and withered chicken breast than to enjoy a good beef stew? Is it the consequence of a society that's feeling more and more alienated from one another; or of a society that's so fixated on youth imagery that for those of us who do not fit that ideal body type must be punished for it with the the false and damning label of 'weak-willed'? Why is it that women who starve themselves into preturnatural thinness are "sexy"--when they are so obviously sexless? If you're not eating, how can you have the energy for sex?

So, I continued to comb thru the turkey recipes until I found not one but *two* Turkey Tetrazzini recipes. One claimed to be a "traditional" one, although it called for shitake mushrooms, and I'm not sure that shitake mushrooms are endemic to Italy (esp. in the era when this recipe's supposed to have been created.) The other was one you'd find on the Carnation Evaporated Milk can. It called for using evap instead of cream, and was much simpler. It was a Comfort Food recipe if there ever was one!

I printed this one out. For future reference. We had potpie instead. It was easier.

I'm still looking for a Turkey A La King recipe. Might have to check my old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Or one of the other weird, obscure cookbooks I have. I doubt there's a good, easy one on line. After all, there's still a whole mess of turkey on that carcass that I have to deal with.