Bringing New Life to Leftovers

I love leftovers, especially holiday leftovers that are wrapped and stuffed in a number of packages and cram-packed into the fridge.

When I was younger, on Thanksgiving Day my parents and I ate lunch at my mamaw's house with some twenty-odd cousins, aunts, uncles and adopted family members. And I always looked forward to dinnertime that night, when we'd drag ourselves into the kitchen, exhausted  and would eat cold turkey, mayo and mustard sandwiches on white bread and I'd eat Jell-O fluff by the spoonful. That was the best part of the whole day!

As I got older, and our celebration became a little more disjointed and we started having our primary meal at my parents house and I'd cart my own menagerie of Tupperware back to mine, I loved re-creating the meal over and over.

I am a creature of habit - almost disturbingly so when it comes to meals. Left to my own devices, I'll master a dish or flavor profile that I fall back to repeatedly. For example, almost every weekend that Jordan's working, I make nachos or quesadillas for lunch. Do I have the ingredients for practically any dish? Sure. Do I have the capability to follow a recipe and create a successful noon-day meal? No doubt. But time and time again, I haphazardly dump Latin ingredients (salsa, guacamole etc.) and chopped up protein leftovers (chicken tenders, pot roast...) onto Santilla corn tortilla chips and nuke it for 90 seconds. Como se dice "deja vu" in espanol?

With that being said, I get a sick pleasure out of reheating duplicate Thanksgiving plates on Friday, Saturday and if I brought big enough Tupperware, Sunday. I recreate the plate dish for dish, I want the turkey, the dressing, the cranberry sauce over and over.

However, I do like to reinvent my leftovers too and today, I think I made a good dish. Jordan was at work today and doesn't like dark meat turkey, so I knew I'd be nibbling on that to leave him his favorite parts for dinner. As mentioned before, my fail-safe is Mexican cuisine so I made the most delicious quesadilla with leftover smoked turkey, shredded sharp cheddar and brie! I may try this again and do just brie and a spread of cranberry sauce, but today I took it in a decisively Mexican profile (go figure).

Despite my sub-par sour cream (I'm a snob) and a lack of guac, this quesadilla is one of my better improvisational lunches. The brie elevated the whole dish - there's melted cheese and then there's melted brie - this gave it a much smoother texture with more gooeyness than stringy meltedness. I think the cheddar contributed more flavor, but the brie added a contrasting texture to the crispness of the tortilla. The turkey, which my dad had smoked, added a much more robust flavor than my usual frozen Tyson grilled chicken strips. It also had some fat (read:flavor!) that a grilled chicken strip lacks.

My dad is a master at this kind of improv with any groceries (he and Jordan did a Chopped challenge where they could only spend $15 to feed four of us 3-courses at a discount store), much less leftovers. He is notorious for getting every last drop of flavor and value out of an item; one of his best examples is a chicken noodle soup made out of KFC chicken and gravy leftovers! I hope to someday have this flair and ability to improvise, but I certainly think this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, with our remaining gallon-sized Ziploc bag of turkey, we'll be able to think outside of the box (and Mexican flavors) for some new dishes this weekend.

Happy eating and reheating!

Saturday update: I just used diced pieces of turkey leg meat to make a wonderful panang curry! Panang curry is often served in Thai restaurants; it's a coconut milk red curry with lots of vegetables and very little heat. It has traditional light and warm Thai flavors without the spice you sometimes find in curries - but I served it with a sprinkle of Thai spice and sriracha for a little oomph. I improvised this recipe- turkey, not tofu; used red curry paste instead of panang curry paste (panang is a red curry with peanuts added - you could probably recreate that, but it isn't carried pre-made in our local stores) and I didn't use Thai basil, either (another shortcoming of our grocery store). The recipe is super easy and other than the coconut milk, we normally have these ingredients on hand, so it was fairly inexpensive (we spent 16 cents on ginger and another 16 cents on snap peas!) and could be a quick dinner in a pinch. If you're looking for a sneaky, not-super-turkey-flavored way to use your leftovers (or any meat/veggie/soy leftovers), this is it!