I find it funny that people (myself included back in the day) happily look forward to taking Thanksgiving leftovers home or prepare it the next day at home. Does anyone here do a sit down Thanksgiving meal with set portions and no leftovers?
I suppose Christmas meals are often overdone with leftovers and maybe Easter for those who search ham or leg of lamb. Any others?
One of my Aunt’s had a belief that no cooking should be done on New Year’s Day, to prevent any potential injury or mishap and whey she cooked before midnight on New Year’s Day was what was served the next day. We’d take a few leftovers like sushi and mochi to munch the next day, but we always cooked something new as it was the first day of the year.
Christmas, definitely. In Barcelona’s traditional Christmas recipes, half the meal of the 26th is made from parts of what has been eaten on the 24th and 25th; most notably, the canelloni are made from the meat used to prepare the broth for the soups. Not as… organized, many families spend a lot of time on the multiple banquets and eat light meals composed mainly of leftovers on the days between those.
There’s just two of us, and we rarely have the chance to get together with family, so we expect leftovers all the time. Turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving and ham leftovers from Christmas become a casserole on New Year’s Day. Easter ham will go into split pea soup.
But other meals last for a few days. Lentil soup is at least 2 meals and 2 days’ worth of lunches for us. And then there’s the week of lasagna every time we make it.
Just about any time pizza is ordered. And pizza happens to be one of the few things (strike that, it’s the only thing) that I will willingly eat as a “leftover.”
Fair enough, good point, but the concept of leftover easter egg chocolate is an alien concept to me. Also, the early demolition of a Thornton’s continental behemoth and pack of fun-sized cadbury’s fudge might explain why Easter lunch is fairly redundant.
Pretty much the only reason my family does turkey at Thanksgiving is so we can make Hot Brown open-faced sandwiches the day after. Those were a specialty dish at the Brown Hotel in Louisville KY, my mom’s hometown.
They’re really rich and delicious.
We went through a stage, several years ago, where we grilled steaks for Thanksgiving. Because we have an individualistic streak, and we decided the only reason we had turkey and stuffing was that everyone else did. And we all considered grilled steak to be the “favorite” food so we decided to go our own way on Thanksgiving.
But we made an error in our calculations. We forgot about the Hot Browns. And we missed them. So we went back to the standard turkey dinner. (also, some in the younger generation did not understand our individuality, and wanted turkey for Thanksgiving because that’s what you were “supposed” to have.) Myself, I miss the steak/twice-baked potatoes/ broccoli cheese casserole / tossed salad/Texas toast Thanksgiving menu.
Since the food is made under dietary restraints (i.e., no leavened bread), it’s a lot easier to cook up a lot of it and eat it for several days than to do it throughout the eight days.
Pizza and lasagna, for sure. Any meal crafted by my SIL, an ex-celeb chef. A supreme burrito for each of us from the best taco truck in the county give two full meals each. But that’s just us. At our company’s weekly team lunches, all leftovers were collected by owners of large dogs.
