Creative cooking with holiday leftovers

The holidays bring an abundance of specially prepared dishes to most homes and, in many cases, leftover food. Recycling the leftovers into new meals is an easy way to cope with the added expense of holiday meals. Rather than throwing away food, put it away right after the meal and save it for the next day.

Some people don’t like eating leftovers, but there are many ways to disguise them in a freshly made dish. Meat is the easiest food to reuse; ham can be chopped up and added to scrambled eggs, or omelets and pasta salad or baked with sliced potatoes and a white sauce for a delicious casserole.

Besides sandwiches, leftover turkey can be put into wraps with your choice of greens, and cranberry sauce. If you’re not a fan of cranberries, a drizzle of your favorite salad dressing will do. Leftover salad and meat wrapped in a tortilla is also an easy way to fix a quick meal.

Combining several kinds of leftovers with chicken broth can make a tasty soup. Last month, my sister Suzy made an out of this world turkey soup with the carcass of our Thanksgiving main dish. She added basmati rice, leftover stuffing, and lots of vegetables. She also made a pumpkin/butternut squash soup. We added leftover yams to that soup and the results were delicious!

If you have whole cooked yams or sweet potatoes leftover, I saw a suggested use in a magazine recently that topped them with sweetened roasted oats for use as a breakfast dish. Packed with vitamins, these potatoes are good to eat any time of the day. As with most leftovers, it just takes a little imagination and recipe tweaking to make them appetizing.

Over 20 years ago, we found a recipe for zucchini soup that includes peas and lima beans – two vegetables I disliked as a child. The key to this recipe is that all the ingredients are pureed after cooking, so the blended soup disguises any taste of those two ingredients. We have used all kinds of vegetables in that soup which makes it a good vehicle for using leftovers. The blender transforms them and you can add herbs and spices to suit your family’s tastes.

One vegetable I don’t recommend for pureeing is green beans even though they are my favorite vegetable. They tend to be stringy and don’t blend well. Leftover green beans can be added to wraps or mixed with potatoes and turkey in a cream sauce.

If you happen to have any mashed or whipped potatoes left, there are several ways to reuse them. They can be used as the top layer of a shepherd’s pie, meat on the bottom and vegetables in the middle, both of which can also be leftovers. For a Scandinavian flair, the potatoes can be mixed with a little flour, butter and cream, then rolled out as lefse which is similar to a tortilla but usually topped with butter and sugar.

Another potato dish is latkes which are normally made with grated potatoes. Boxed mixes for latkes can be found in grocery stores, but leftover mashed potatoes work just as well in making potato pancakes cooked in oil and topped with sour cream or applesauce.

Leftover fruit salads, even those with marshmallows in them, can be blended into a smoothie with yogurt, juice and ice, or used as a topping for ice cream, pancakes or waffles.

Repurposing desserts is also possible if you eat them without overeating. Pie fillings especially can be used in other dishes. Pumpkin pie, minus the crust, can be added to soup for a creamy texture while fruit fillings can be used, like fruit salad, as toppings at breakfast, on toast, waffles and pancakes. Apple filling can top off potato pancakes in place of applesauce. Or, leftover desserts can be put in the freezer for a few weeks. Just be sure to wrap them well before freezing.

So, when it comes to cooking with leftovers, be creative and transform what’s left from your holiday meal into a completely different dish worth another taste.

For tips on saving and cooking with leftovers safely, see http://www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/Leftovers_and_Food_Safety.pdf