This week with Thanksgiving soon on us a prompt relating to the holiday was chosen. The orginal prompt was: Describe the best leftover creation you’ve ever concocted. Make one up if you never stooped to using Thanksgiving leftovers for a month after the holidays. Whether it’s a sandwich with all the ingredients or desert mixture with six different pies, make it awesome and make it tasty.

The group is always told your response whatever it may be is the right response. Any who read these responses will realize it isn’t always about Thanksgiving or a typical holiday meal.

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The two of us enjoy a large Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. There is no such thing as a small two-person turkey. Even after giving the dogs a share, the leftovers barely fit in the fridge. For the following week we work on finishing this fridge full of food. We have sandwiches, we have cold plates, we have vegetables, yams and potatoes. Normally we don’t have dessert, but this week we have dessert everyday including pumpkin pie, trifle and chocolate cake. We’ve tried every combination of these staples, fried them, microwaved them and mixed them all together in traditional combos like bubble and squeak. Finally, we put everything into a big soup pot, which we boil for hours to get another week’s worth of delicious soup for our lunches.

Cheers

Stephen Smith

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Supper that evening along Puget Sound’s Henderson’s Inlet was made with leftovers from the previous days of our survival training hike. Richard Glover’s mother, the original hippy in 1953, would’ve nodded her approval of our recipe.

Ingredients: two good sized bay oysters simmered in their shells on our fire’s coals the previous evening; my hat’s crown brimming with stinging nettle tops plucked before yesterday; a couple of “tortillas” rolled from cattail root starch and protein without the stringy fibers; softened rose hips; and white alder wood ash condiments instead of salt and pepper.

Richard thickened the cattail paste and rolled each of us a couple of tortillas on my metal canteen’s side.

The nectar poured from the oysters was simmered again in the large gaper clam shell on the coals as we’d done the evening before. It absorbed each nettle top dropped in while softening tiny hypodermics holding formic acid. Sting neutralized, our potherb was ready.

We chopped the oysters into random bites and stirred them into leftover cattail flour and some simmered nettle. That mix made our stuffing, a la sans turkey or whatever bird. My arrow had missed the ruffed grouse poking its head out of the beach forest next to where we picked up the oysters.

Several frozen then thawed soft rose hips with tough seeds removed formed a kind of sauce with oyster nectar and wood ash.

With all those good eats who had room for pie? We chewed down on sculpin sushi, graced with neither rice nor seaweed, for dessert.

Donavin A. Leckenby

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I’ve done a lot with leftovers over the years. From Sandwiches to enchiladas to soup. But one of my all time favorites is mashed potato pancakes. A hit every time!

Meleesa Stevens

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Contemplating the diverse ingredients, I had left over after our Thanksgiving dinner I looked in the fridge bewildered.

Turkey wasn’t going to be one of the ingredients as the twenty of us had picked the bird clean, no stuffing or green bean I casserole left either. I had a cup of jellied cranberries, the wild rice I hadn’t needed for my stuffing, an extra package of cream cheese and about one-half cup of chopped pecans.

I stood considering my unusual food stuffs and had a flashback to an appetizer I’d made for a neighborhood gathering in the summer. Three of these items were in the recipe for the appetizer: the wild rice, the cream cheese and the chopped pecans. The only difference being the recipe called for mango chutney and I had none of it, but surely the jellied cranberry would be a good substitute.

I combined the cream cheese with the wild rice and jellied cranberry. Added some spices and put my bowl in the refrigerator to chill. Before our evening meal I formed the chilled mixture into two-inch balls and rolled them in the chopped pecans.

Yummy.

Christine Howard