We hit a milestone last night: we ate the last of the Thanksgiving turkey.
Well, I'm playing just a little fast and loose with the facts: technically, it's not the "Thanksgiving turkey"; it's "the turkey we bought on sale the Saturday after Thanksgiving". We don't host Thanksgiving, so I wasn't on the hook to provide the bird for that feast. But I swooped in and grabbed a 10 lb turkey breast that weekend, we gave it a few days to thaw in the fridge, and then we roasted it the following Thursday. And since then, we've been eating turkey.
When we roast a chicken or turkey, or pork roast or beef roast or spiral sliced ham, we try to consume everything, or as close to everything as we can. We toss the giblets (innards) into the roasting pan with the bird, and I eat the liver and other parts. My wife makes gravy from the drippings. A day or two after that first meal, I generally clean whatever meat is left on the bones, put the meat into the fridge and/or freezer, and make soup stock from the bones. In this case, I made turkey stock, and fed my family turkey noodle soup that evening; it was pretty good except that I got a little heavy-handed adding in the noodles, so it came out more like a noodle dish than a soup. But still tasty. Then I made Turkey Collette (recipe below). Then turkey enchiladas. Then, last night, I made a turkey pot pie. In between, I had turkey sandwiches for lunch a couple of times. And that finished it off. Except for some skin and some of the connective tissue on the carcass, we've eaten all if it (or will have; at present, half the turkey pot pie sits in our fridge; it's pretty common in our house that leftovers beget more leftovers).
Turkey Collette probably sounds fancier than it is. We don't know what this dish is actually supposed to be called; Collette was my wife's aunt, who passed along the recipe to us. It can be made with turkey, chicken or ham. It probably would work with beef or pork but we've never tried it. I'm guessing it hearkens from the 1950s era of homemaking, when ingredients like Campbell's Soup or Jello were the foundation for popular dishes; as that is the era in which my mom learned to cook, it's right down the middle of the fairway for my taste. Here is how to make it:
4 tbsp butter, melted
1 package cream cheese, softened
1 tbsp milk
2 tbsp minced onion
2 tbsp chopped green pepper
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 cups chopped turkey, chicken or ham
Salt and pepper to taste
2 packages Pillsbury Crescent Rolls
2 tbsp butter, melted
With an electric mixer, cream together the 4 tbsp melted butter, cream cheese and milk until the mixture is smooth. Mix in the chopped vegetables, meat, salt and pepper until they're evenly distributed.
Spray a cookie sheet with non-stick spray. Open the crescent roll packages, unroll the dough, and separate it at the perforations so that two crescent rolls remain connected to one another, side by side, to form a rectangle - you should get four rectangles from each package. Lie each rectangle on a cutting board or countertop, scoop 1/8 of the meat and vegetable mixture out of the mixing bowl and drop it into the center of the square. Bring the two long sides of the rectangle together and lightly seal them on top, as well as sealing the ends of the rectangles. The result is a sort of a stuffed crescent roll dough rectangle. The recipe yields eight of these. Place the eight filled rectangles onto the cookie sheet and brush with the 2 tbsp melted butter. According to the original recipe, you could then sprinkle with bread crumbs, but we always skip that step. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes or until golden brown. The original recipe also calls for a sherry sauce but we always skip it - they're pretty good as-is.
What do you do with your holiday leftovers?
Turkey Collette sounds pretty good, I might have to try that sometime.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was working we got a turkey before Thanksgiving from the company. Actually the retirees can have one too. This year I passed. My dirty little secret; the past several years I've been giving my turkey to St. Vincent de Paul. The main reason being I just am sick of dealing with whole turkeys (I know, first world problem!) My oldest son and daughter in law have been hosting Thanksgiving lately. This year we didn't get to go due to cruddy weather and me being sick with a sinus infectiom.
We are planning a family get together at our house on the 22nd. I will either get a whole turkey breast or a boneless ham. None of us likes the dark meat anyway. When I get to heaven my great-grandma will probably chew me out. Because, talk about making use of everything but the gobble, she would end up by boiling the carcass to make scrapple. Not only that, but it was probably a wild turkey that they shot.
I'm trying to think of stuff the granddaughters will eat. The oldest one is pretty good about eating what is there. The younger two are still at the stage where they are too busy entertaining everyone to eat much. Last weekend we got together to eat the pies that we were supposed to eat at Thanksgiving (they had been in the freezer). The granddaughters were more interested in the can of Reddi Whip. You can have all kinds of fun With Reddi Whip.
Katherine, I think that's wonderful, that you give your turkey to SVdP. Our Outreach group, which was a St. Vincent de Paul Society at its inception (but then we left - kind of a long story) gets turkeys donated every year.
DeleteThe tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving - and Christmas - strikes me as pretty humane, because it's just about the most cost-effective protein out there. If you can pony up the $25-$30 for a turkey (or a good deal less, if your supermarket has cheap prices), and are committed to eating leftovers, you get a lot of meals from that one purchase.
Our kids didn't care for turkey when they were young. My mom still makes Thanksgiving dinner every year, and at some point when our kids came along, she started serving mac and cheese with Thanksgiving dinner so the kids would eat something other than crescent rolls and pie.
You can send me the dark meat - it's what I like. White poultry meat, to me, has the flavor of particle board unless there is gravy or mayo or sauce of some sort.
Not liking dark meat? That is, at best, a venial sin. Beware of your soul!!!!
DeleteSome very nice person (I think I know who) arranges for our food pantry to have 200+ turkeys to give people on Thanksgiving. I suspect many of those go to waste because when you are poor, you probably can't do much with a big, time-consuming bird that needs hour in an oven. But the thought counts.
ReplyDeleteI try to avoid turkey, although when we entertained at my favorite steakhouse this year (party of five), and I did have the Thanksgiving Special. Which I hope is it for me and turkey for this year. When we used to do things at home with the family, ham or Mom's special lasagna was the dish of the day. Now, if we have a group down here, our vegan does the cooking. We have Field Roast and edamame and like it (or disguise our dislike). The roast ain't too bad now that I've gotten used to it. Looks like roast beef, tastes like tofu, but tastes more like roast beef with a lot of gravy added. King George III allegedly told Georg Frederick Handel, "Too many notes, Mr. Handel, too many notes." At vegan meals, I have the same reaction to the vegetables.
A turkey that needs an hour in the oven? More like three or four, depending on how big. Back in the 60s when microwaves started to get common, my uncle, the gadget man, decided he was going to host Thanksgiving, and showcase their new microwave. Dinner was really, really late, and the bird was like rubber. They ended up having to finish cooking it in the real oven.
DeleteThen there was the era of the oil turkey fryer. My brother brought one of those to Thanksgiving, and offered to cook the turkey. This one was propane and you had to do it outside. It was a pretty cold day, and he had blue fingers before it was over. But he was able listen to the football game on his cell phone. Gadget guys!
Tom, does your vegan ever cook Tofurkey? I have never tried it, but I guess it's a real thing. Field Roast doesn't tempt me. I believe you about the gravy making it taste better, but how do you make vegan gravy?
DeleteI haven't really cooked for decades, so I have no tips or tricks of my own for leftovers.
DeleteWhen I was living at home, the leftover Thanksgiving turkey was sliced and kept in the refrigerator to make sandwiches—bread (white!), sliced tomato, lettuce (Iceberg only!), and mayonnaise (Hellmann's only!).
A ham provided three meals—sliced ham, ham salad, and a hambone cooked with potatoes and green beans. We had a manual meat grinder that attached to a counter or table edge, and my father ground the ham in that. I remember liking it, but it makes me a little queasy when I think about it now. I can't think of any other use for ground meat that is already cooked.
My sisters and my brother and I had a recent exchange of e-mails in which we tried to recall family meals from when we all lived at home. My father did a fair amount of the cooking, and on the whole he was a good cook (and baker, too) He made great fried chicken and potato salad (a frequent Sunday midday dinner he prepared while the rest of us went to church). However, when he got creative with leftovers, the results often left a lot to be desired. But coming of age in the Depression, he was quite frugal, and so complaints about leftovers didn't get us much of anywhere. He famously (in our family) saved money by buying store brand cookies. He did almost all of the shopping (even when my mother was doing most of the cooking), and his preferred supermarket was the A&P. (It is hard to believe they no longer exist!) The store brand of cookies was Ann Page, and my younger sister memorably maintained that they tasted like sawdust. Whatever we didn't eat (and they didn't disappear all that fast), my father would finish "so they wouldn't go to waste." I vowed that when I was self-supporting, I would always buy name brand products and have Coca-Cola in unlimited quantities. It is a vow that I have largely kept (although now it is Coke Cherry Zero of Coke Zero Sugar). But I find that compared to others, I am still quite frugal, shopping in supermarkets rather than small convenience stores and taking advantage of sales. I happened to be at a Gristedes (a New York supermarket chain) on West 86th St. recently and saw Chobani Yogurt selling for $2.29 a container when it sells for 99¢ in my local Whole Foods. (And they call it Whole Paycheck! It's certainly not in Manhattan.) I couldn't believe my eyes! Who would shop in such a place?
David, you were lucky about the turkey ending up sliced and in the fridge. My mom was all about food safety, too. Stuff didn't get left out for germs to grow. However when I got married, my mother in law was like, "We always left turkey sitting out, and nobody ever died from it." She would leave it on the back of the stove (which had a pilot light and was always warm). I kind of figured out that she was tired from fixing a big meal and didn't want to deal with the remains of the turkey right after dinner. So I volunteered for the task of slicing the meat off the bone, wrapping it, and putting it in the fridge. I'm a bit of a germophobe and didn't want ptomaine, salmonella, listeria, or any of that other stuff.
DeleteDavid, my life parallels your dad's at least on this topic - I do a lot of the cooking, most of the grocery shopping, and my leftover "creativity" doesn't always succeed (my wife is better than I am at that sort of thing).
DeleteMy mother always shopped at the A&P in the town in which I grew up in Michigan, and I remember the Ann Page store brand very well. I will say that I didn't 'inherit' your dad's willingness to eat store-brand cookies, though. Not that I lay off the cookies - I just spend more on it, I guess. But more recently the prospect of consuming more Nabisco or Keebler's products hasn't been very enticing.
Katherine, I meant hourS in the oven. And, yes, in his early days our Vegan cooked Tofurkey, but it did not go over well. (Of course, my wife invites people older than us for Christmas, and they never heard of such a thing). When Field Roast appeared, even our Vegan admitted Tofurkey isn't very good.
DeleteI was preening a bit in this post about how efficient we are with leftover turkey. But we have a long way to go. As I cleaned up after last night's dinner, I worked one appliance pretty hard: the garbage disposal. I had cooked Rice-A-Roni as a side dish; our family ate about half of it, and I dumped the rest down the drain. We've learned from a quarter century or so of family life that nobody in our house will eat leftover Rice-A-Roni (I'm well aware that a lot of people won't even eat freshly cooked Rice-A-Roni :-). But what can I say: our kids still like it, and I don't mind it, either). I had sliced up a couple of apples and put it on the dinner table in a bowl; there was still about an apple's worth of slices left later that evening. I had cooked some carrots; I misjudged the portions, and there were 1-2 servings left. We dump a lot of food down the garbage disposal every day, and it's not because of sheer carelessness on our part - it's just hard to judge (hard for me to judge, anyway) how much to prepare for any given meal when we're serving anywhere from three to six family members at any given meal.
ReplyDeleteDespite all the food we throw away every day, there are also quite a few leftovers in our fridge on any given day. We end up eating some but not all of what we save. Every week or so, we purge leftovers that have been sitting in tupperware in our refrigerator because it has aged beyond what we think is a safe expiration date. Mostly this should just be chalked up to our unwillingness to eat leftovers.
Probably, if we let everyone in our family prepare their own food, rather than one person preparing a family meal, we'd be a good deal more efficient in our food consumption. Between the range top, the oven, the microwave, the toaster oven, the grill, the toaster - we have a lot of options for cooking food, and it probably would be feasible to have everyone cooking something. But I'm not willing to relinquish the notion of a family meal. I think there is a spiritual dimension to it.
But there is a spiritual dimension to not wasting food, too. We can do better.
Jim, I agree with you that there is a spiritual dimension to a family meal. I think it trumps whatever waste of food might inadvertently happen.
DeleteSometimes food gets thrown out because it need to be. Some of our elders who grew up in the Depression era have been known to keep food which is WAY past its shelf date.