Ok, I’ve been inspired by accident, which is always fun.
Now that Thanksgiving has passed, and all stomachs are now looking towards December and January for future feasting, we may actually be able to have some execution of the recepies improvised herein.
THE CHALLENGE
Required recipe #1:
A holiday side dish for a potluck feast.
Required recipe #2:
Utilizing the materials presented by “the usual” holiday leftovers, combined with the leftovers from your above recipe, create a delicious dish. Resurrect your own delectable zombie from the land of flat microwaved mashed potatos.
My accidental discovery…
As a quick and hopefully tasty side dish to bring to my family’s Thanksgiving, I whipped up a sligthly modified double batch of this recipe that I’d found online. When I started searching, I already knew I wanted to do something with wild rice and dried cranberries, but not exactly what…until I found that recipe.
I modified it by putting only 1/2 as much chopped green onion and half as much rosemary as the recipe called for(as Mrs. WeHaveCookies doesn’t care for either) . Another thing I noticed was that the online recipe called for different instructions for preparation of the wild rice, than what was on the boxes of the rice. I ended up following the online instructions and it worked out perfect. I would carefully consider whether or not you want to double the recipe though. We had 16 people and everyone liked the dish and took seconds, but we still only managed to go through 1/2 of what I’d made with all of the other food to choose from.
The meal was fantastic, and we were sent home with a fair amount of my cranberry wild rice and some leftover turkey. We had turkey sandwiches later Thanksgiving night. But on Friday evening, while Mrs. WeHaveCookies and her Mom went Black Fridaying at Target, I got inspired and started cleaning and shredding the leftover turkey. Using a ratio of about 1 cup of shredded turkey for every 2 cups of wild rice salad, I mixed this well with a healthy dollup of Best Foods/Hellman’s Mayo and some salt and pepper. This resulted in…
The…best…turkey…salad…EVER. Seriously.
Only slightly surpassed by adding Peppered Bacon Salt instead of regular salt and pepper, as I did, to a small portion. The textures of the wild rice and cranberries had my mouth completely convinced that the salad included crumbles of real bacon.