Food: 2010 or The Year of Recycling

While it's not particularily "green" to recycle an old blog post, I'm going to refer you to my 2009 Post-Thanksgiving post about what to do with all that leftover Holiday ham and turkey.  It contains both my Turkey chow mein and Ham and Egg Fried Rice recipes.

Food: Leftover Purgatory

With a large amount of leftover turkey, ham, and dressing, and a small amount of potatoes, cranberry, and other sides, there are only so many plates of leftovers you can make before things start looking sad. Then comes sandwiches... you can use an entire loaf of bread in one weekend if you do sandwiches. Especially if you start doing club sandwiches with three slices of bread... the middle slice is especially good on a warm sandwich if it's been soaked in gravy.

Then when everyone is sick of sandwiches, it's time to break out the recipes.

I am particularily fond of two recipes after Thanksgiving, as it uses up the main meat leftovers but still leaves enough to stash in the freezer.

Turkey Chow Mein

2 C. Chopped cooked turkey
1 whole onion
2 Tb. Soy sauce
1 Tb. Sherry (optional)
2 Tb. Oil
1 C turkey or chicken broth
3 Tb. corn starch
1 Tb. molasses
1-15 oz can Chop Suey vegetables (more variety than chow mein veggies and the bonus of crunchy water chestnuts)

Saute onion and turkey in a mixture of the oil, sherry and soy sauce until onion is tender. Mix together cold broth, molasses, and cornstarch, set aside. Add chop suey vegetables. Push pan contents to the edges of the pan, leaving a well in the middle. Give the broth mixture a stir, then add all at once to the pan, making sure to get it all in there. Stir constantly and heat over high heat until cornstarch thickens and is bubbly. Stir the ingredients pushed to the edge back into the middle. Let bubble over medium heat for another minute or two. Serve over hot rice or chow mein noodles.

You may want to create some extra rice so you can make the following:

Ham and Egg Fried rice

2 C chopped cooked ham
2 eggs
3 C cooked rice
2-3 green onions with tops, chopped
2 Tb. soy sauce
2-4 Tb. oil

Heat oil in a deep skillet. Beat the eggs, and add to the pan. Cook until set, but do not let them brown. Remove from pan and break them apart in a small bowl. Set them aside.

Add ham and soy sauce to the oil left in the pan, adding more oil if needed. Cook and stir for a minute, then add the rice. When the rice is warmed through, add the eggs back to the pan, then add the green onion. In a few minutes, everything should be heated through and fragrant. Serve immediately.

Food: Eating from the stash

Just as I have a knitting stash of yarn, so too I consider my freezer food a stash for later. Like a squirrel, I guess. This past week has been mostly about eating from the stash to make room for make-ahead Thanksgiving goodies.

I still have more than half a case of canned organic pumpkin from last year (bought on sale), so that's where the pumpkin pies are coming from. I have a bunch of apples (from my first batch this fall) frozen as pie filling, so apple is taken care of as well. I still have that load of hot dog buns Barronius bought in the freezer, so what isn't made into crumbs for later will be cubed for stuffing and dressing.

So the big purchases are going to be cranberries, turkey (possibly just a breast), and ham. I ended up tossing what was left of our ham from Christmas last year just recently... it wasn't the nice pretty slices anyway, it was the unsliced heel and the bone, mostly, and I never did get around to making bean soup from it. We're not big soup people.

I never feel well-fed after soup, no matter how much bread I dunk in it.

So anyway, starting this week would be a good time to keep an eye on your store flyers for turkey and ham on sale. Also, if you've been dying to get one of those Nesco roaster/slow cooker appliances, those usually go on sale this time of year too. Watch places like hardware stores , W-mart, and even electronics stores if they carry appliances.

The roasters are good for doing more than cooking turkeys... I've heard people mention baking cookies in them, and other oven chores when they don't want to heat up a whole oven or their kitchen is being remodeled. They are also good for slow-cooking fruit butters. ;)

That's my advice for this pre-Thanksgiving season... watch for the sales. Stock up if you can. Pre-cooked turkey in the freezer is just as good as and can be substituted for cooked chicken, and at sale prices of around $.49 a pound, a real bargain.