The Leftover Turkey List – Lucky Thirteen

These suggestions are offered just in case you are like me and turn out to still have some left. Eternity is famously “two people and a ham,” but turkey is even more so, in my opinion. This may have something to do with the fact that Bill is strictly a ham sandwich man, so I can’t count on lunch for help. (A bit about Dr. Huey follows.)

Thirteen Things to do with Leftover Turkey

shortcuts included

 

1. Soup – with a great deal of escarole and lemon and garlic and maybe some pasta.
2. Hash – parsnips aren’t usually part of hash, but they make a nice change from carrots. A little bacon never hurt anybody.
3. Tacos – best with dark meat. A little fresh pineapple perks up almost any basic salsa.
4. Croquettes – I know, frying. If you can’t bear it, make turkey cakes. A little less crust but almost as good.
5. Tetrazini
6. Mole –  respectable if not wonderful pre-made mole sauces are increasingly available. I wouldn’t start from scratch.
7. Pot pie – If I didn’t keep home made piecrust on hand at all times, I’d use Dufour frozen puff pastry, the busy cook’s friend.
8. Stuffed portobellos – a bit of leftover stuffing to mix with the meat seems a lot to ask at this point, but if you have some…
9. Thai green curry with coconut milk – the recipe on the curry jar (or can) works fine.
10. Salad with romaine, scallions, avocados and endive –  a modest number of pomegranate seeds are pretty and tasty.
11. Diced in vinaigrette, with chickpeas, garlic, lemon and parsley – a great chance to be lavish with first class olive oil.
12. Calzone, with mozzarella, thyme and scallions – refrigerated pizza dough will do in a pinch. Industrial mozzarella won’t.
13. Shortcake – in cream sauce, on cheddar biscuits.

Concerning Dr. Huey

I wrote about this rose some years ago. Here’s a repeat of the gist of it:

Until quite recently, if you bought a rose bush at a garden center, you probably bought a grafted plant made of two roses: the big flowered beauty you see on top, and a fast growing, hardy, adaptable something else providing the roots underneath.

More often than not, the else underneath would have been a climber named Dr. Huey, introduced in 1920 and still going strong.

He’s vigorous; he withstands frost; nematodes bother him not. He’s just down there waiting for the prima donna on his head to freeze or falter – or for the gardener to fail to notice that those healthy-looking new shoots do not look quite right.

Given his chance, Dr. Huey makes long thin canes that climb 8 to 10 feet if given support. Unsupported, they arch and tangle into a mounding shrub. The open blooms are a rich dark red to purple red and there are a lot of them – for about 3 weeks in late spring.

To see Dr. Huey in person almost anywhere in America, just look in places where fancy roses may have come to grief:  in cemeteries, in older, established neighborhoods with front gardens, near farmhouses that have lost their farms to housing developments.

Dr. Huey was here when we came and I somehow can’t bear to cast him out completely, but I do keep moving the plant to less and less prominent spots and I’d probably be harder hearted if I had less space.