A Couple Of Thanksgiving Leftover Meals

While I enjoy the standard Thanksgiving meal menu, I prefer the turkey made into leftover dishes. Since we had a direct repeat of our T-day meal on Friday, it was now time to move on to other things – I did have dressing with gravy for breakfast on Fri, Sat, & Sun – that’s why no new breakfast posts.

In the past few weeks, Bev had mentioned a desire for both tortilla soup and some type of turkey soup and I had saved a recipe that looked like it fit the bill. It’s called Ranch Style Tortilla Soup and comes from Lea Ann over at Mangos, Chili and Z – check out her site for the recipe and pictures.

We followed the recipe with just a few minor changes – we used leftover turkey rather than chicken, added a can of drained black beans for a little contrasting color, and used a higher ratio of Rotel to tomatoes, because when I upped the recipe amounts to 1½ times, it fit the can sizes we had. We also used blue corn chips because we had a bag already opened, and it used up two avocados that were about to get too ripe. I really like it when a recipe calls for ingredients we have on hand and need to be utilized – the only thing we had to buy were the poblanos. Here it is in the pot.

And my bowl.

We had six for dinner and all but Bev’s sister (who rarely gives anything new a high grade) thought it was outstanding. The poblanos and Rotel gave it just a nice little heat in the back of my throat, which makes it good for all but those who demand zero heat. Bev likes to have tortilla soup fairly often and this will be made again. Thanks for sharing the recipe Lea Ann.

One of my favorite Thanksgiving leftover recipes is fried, potato pancakes for breakfast (of course), so this meal was built around them. I had a choice of fried eggs on top of the potatoes or scrambled eggs beside them. I went with scrambled as I hadn’t had them in a while and the fried would have hidden the potatoes.

My mom always just formed the potatoes into cakes with no additions and fried them (they came apart easily). Bev likes to add a little flour, an egg, and milk – if they’re too dry, to help hold them together – which I believe is an improvement. Sometimes diced onion, herbs, etc. goe in, but I went with the pure version today.

So for breakfast, it was potato pancakes, scrambled eggs, and a little reheated stuffing (I skipped it on Monday).  I can't seem to get into the habit of adding a little something - like chopped green onion - to make it prettier.  Since I'd been waiting three hours for our @&%# power to come back on, I was in a bit of a hurry and mildly irked.

When I watch the cooks on the cooking shows, they rarely ever put up a finished plate that they haven't sprinkled something on.

The leftover we didn’t make this year was turkey salad (we ran out of turkey) and I didn’t make stock from the turkey carcass and bones, as they had too much sweetness from the cooking glaze. I’ll just have to smoke a turkey in the near future to make into salad – I prefer the smoked version anyway and have two birds in the freezer.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry