I know, Christmas dinner is special, but after the whirlwind of cooking, the excitement and a couple of glasses of fizz, you don’t savour it properly at the table. It’s the Boxing Day when you really appreciate what a difference brining the turkey has made and how gorgeous the spice rub is on the duck. Unless you are that mad person that braises a whole ham for Boxing Day and has the house full of people to feed again.
In the former case, which applies to me (Boxing Day is for watching movies, doing jigsaw puzzles and unsticking bits of Sellotape from wrapping paper), cold turkey (hehe) with reheated gravy and festive red cabbage is the proper feast. Any roast you served on Christmas Day will be as lovely cold. And it also means you can put your feet up and have a proper rest from cooking, finally.
What to do with the leftovers past Boxing Day? Do not waste them, that’s the first principle. The roast meat needs to be brought to room temperature, the meat picked off the bones and frozen in sensible portions. It will be a fantastic sandwich filler in a couple of weeks’ time. If you want to use meat for dinners, all it takes is to chop it up, add some cheese or sliced vegetables and wrap up in pastry or tortillas.
Chopped up or minced meat is a great ingredient and here’s a bunch of recipes to use it in – no matter whether it is poultry, beef or pork. Apart from tacos, there are stuffed vegetables: courgettes, peppers or large tomatoes. Duck pastilla is delightful and you can use turkey meat in it just as well. Likewise, rissolles can be made with any cooked meat.
Lots of cheese in the fridge? Make a spicy cheesy lentil bake one night in the week. Or bake a batch of blue cheese and oats biscuits for snacking on New Year’s Eve.
It’s the second time we welcome the New Year with trepidation. Will it always be thus? Boosters and a seesaw of travel planning and cancelling? Or worse: the Stockholm syndrome of getting used to sticking a swab up your nose before meeting friends and a laptop perched forever on the kitchen table? I’ll lose that thought – I hope that we can still look forward to exciting things and the virus, if it stays arounds, will eventually amount to a bunch of inconveniences.
And that’s what I wish you all, my friends. Thank you for visiting Cuisine Fiend this year, trying out my recipes and leaving lovely comments. Do come back and bring friends, neighbours and relations in 2022!
Happy New Year everybody!