Saregama
October 27, 2025, 6:44pm
1
What are you doing with your holiday leftovers?
– 2025 Thanksgiving thread is here .
– 2025 Winter Holidays planning thread is here .
– 2025 Mishaps thread is here
Inspiration from past years:
What’s happening with your leftovers?
Here are past years for inspiration:
What did you repurpose this year? I started with a cranberry sauce lassi.
[lassi]
Share your leftovers ideas, successes and failures here. Enquiring minds want to know!
Whether it’s holiday meals or other situations where you have lots of leftovers - what are your most creative / favorite ways to repurpose them?
Yes sandwiches, salads, pot pies, casseroles, soups. But what’s a little further from recognizable?
Years ago, I ate and loved a Madhur jaffrey chicken curry recipe at someone’s house - itvwas made with leftover turkey meat.
One year, slash-rate carcasses I bought for stock after Christmas yielded so much cooked meat (3 or 4 lbs iirc) I froze it and…
So what are your favorite uses for thanksgiving leftovers?
Anything goes including hot turkey sammies, turkey soup, turkey tetrazzini, etc., with extra points for creativity.
I will start with two of my favorites:
Pulled Turkey in a KC style bbq sauce with molasses, tomato and cider vinegar. Makes great sammies on a toasted kaiser, and it’s also easy to freeze in for later.
Turkey Tikka Masala with curry paste, extra ginger, garlic, onion, tomato and heavy cream. I usually have leftover c…
I’m very new to Food52 and while reading through a few recipes found this topic which I thought would marry well with best uses for leftover turkey topic this time of year. Several of the highlighted recipes would not have dawned on me and several elevate enough to warrant making extra mashed potatoes…as if, ha!
https://food52.com/blog/24729-best-leftover-mashed-potato-recipes
please add your own ideas to the topic. TIA.
Rooster
Am I the only one who has trouble using up sweet/dessert/dairy items? How do you all deal with it? I have 90% of a box of whipping cream left in my fridge about to go bad and I can’t be bothered making an entire cake just to get rid of it. Same with milk, throw it away all the time. Why do dairy products have to be like this… Gustavo Woltmann
1 Like
This turkey and squash looks interesting!
Maybe I will make it with my leftover Canadian Thanksgiving turkey (in the freezer ) and my spaghetti squash from the garden.
kobuta
October 28, 2025, 2:53pm
3
Turkey congee is always the #1 leftover dish after Thanksgiving. I will get larger turkeys just to have more options for turkey congee (and my family all want leftovers to make the same).
Saregama
October 28, 2025, 5:00pm
4
The best use of leftover turkey I think is to get far away culturally in the reuse — things where chicken would otherwise go – thai curry, curry noodle soup, indian curry preps (make the sauce entirely first), and kababs.
I just used up a pile of rotisserie chicken in kababs — food processor with spices and some lentils (cooked channa dal) and aromatics, form into patties and pan-fry or bake. Gone in a flash!
Though I do love turkey soup and pot pie.
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I use it for Turkey Avgolemono Soup and a Tom Kha Turkey. This year, I made Turkey Avgolemono Soup twice.
I haven’t ever made Turkey Tetrazzini.
I have made a good Coronation Turkey,
and a good Country Captain Turkey (which is a historical American curry of sorts, from the South ), but not recently!
I’ll include the Emeril recipe
This recipe calls for raw turkey tenders , instead of chicken. I would substitute the raw turkey with cooked leftover turkey.
Chef Vishwesh Bhatt’s take on the classic, colonial American dish, speaks to North America’s deep historical ties to Indian cuisine.
Est. reading time: 2 minutes
DaBadger
October 28, 2025, 7:19pm
6
Oooo, now you did it. perfect brunch item for the day after. Gracias por the suggestion. Congee Friday!
1 Like
LaLa
October 28, 2025, 8:17pm
7
