Leftover mashed potato soup
OK, so you’re asleep at the wheel of a late-model Buick Regal going way too fast on a one-lane bridge high above a yawning, rocky gorge through which flows an alligatorinfested river of fire. As you hurtle toward the far side of the bridge, you startle awake and remember that you’re on your way home, where you’ll spend the next several days preparing Thanksgiving dinner for a mixed and mottled assortment of relatives and acquaintances.
At this realization, do you: A) Seize control of the wheel and continue on your journey, or, B) Go back to sleep in the hopes your car smashes through the guardrail and plummets into the sharp and gnashing jaws of the conflagrating beasts waiting far, far below?
For me, it’s a toss-up.
It’s not just the exhausting, multiday preparation of the traditional Thanksgiving spread, a meal I’ve never really liked in the first place. Turkey, stuffing, yams. Yams, for the love of God!
It’s also the fact that, when it’s (finally!) over and the brown, poultryflavored dust has settled, all I want is to eat something — anything — that doesn’t taste like Norman Rockwell’s funeral repast. And that’s a problem in itself because, as we all know, half the fun of Thanksgiving is all those delicious leftovers!
Spare me.
Ah, if only there were some way to exploit all those leftovers without having to re-create a warmed-over, desultory replica of Thursday’s feast.
Why you need to learn this
Waste not, want not, I always say. A penny saved is a penny earned. Look both ways before crossing the street. What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Mommy, I’m so very, very cold.
The steps you take
If you’re like me, you’re married to my wife. And that means you know that there’s nothing she loves more than a great big plate of Thanksgiving leftovers.
Me, on the other hand, as I said, I’m usually done before it even begins. I blame it on childhood holidays resplendent with turkey drama and overcooked family, in no particular order. Regardless, my strategy, polished o’er the years to a sparkly sheen, is to confine each recently passed holiday to the locked and darkened attic of my psyche and treat the leftovers groaning in the fridge as just another ingredient in something that I’d actually like to eat, irrespective of the time of year.
Tons of turkey? No prob. It’s close enough to chicken that I can pretend: pesto turkey salad, turkey quesadillas, turkey fried rice — it’s all good. And don’t ask me to wax longingly and at length about the Cobb salad, because I will.
Mashed potatoes? Ermagerd, so easy. Potato pancakes. Potato soup. Shepherd’s pie. Croquettes, gnocchi, pierogis — somebody stop me.
Green beans? Asian stir-fries, salade Nicoise, late-night nibbles picked surreptitiously with darting fingers directly from the fridge.
Truly I tell thee, most of the stuff of the Thanksgiving dance can be that easily doled out after the ball is over.
Here’s the thing about cooking with leftovers, though: When you’re following a recipe — any recipe — you should not believe it in the way you believe the Holy Writ of the faith of your choice. Recipes, unlike Writs writ Holy, are of human provenance and include ingredients and implements whose properties can vary from season to season and kitchen to kitchen.
In other words, all recipes are approximations — or, as I like to tell my students, “Recipe, schmecipe” — because different ingredients behave differently and different tools achieve different results.
Think of ovens, and how different brands will heat differently or how maybe they aren’t calibrated exactly. Or consider the many types of tomatoes, with different water contents, different acidities, different degrees of ripeness. And that’s not even considering the differences between canned