What to do with Christmas leftovers? They are usually better than the Christmas dinner, so do not waste them!
Roast meats needs to be brought to room temperature, the meat picked off the bone and frozen in sensible portions, for a fantastic sandwich filler in a couple of weeks’ time. If you want to use the meat for dinners, all it takes is to chop it up, add some cheese or sliced vegetables and wrap up in pastry or tortillas.
Here are some excellent recipes to adapt for immediate and future use of festive leftovers.
Turkey Caesar salad is just as wonderful as one with chicken, or better and I’m surprised it doesn’t feature in the lists of leftovers recipes. Best to make it with reasonably fresh turkey meat so it’s a menu for 27th or 28th of December. Chicken, of course, or roast duck can be used like this too.
Bang bang your turkey: make the (more gorgeous than words can describe) sauce, shred some vegetables and bring the turkey meat to room temperature. You can simply slice it into small chunks instead of shredding.
After the massive meat overload that Christmas usually is, we need a fibre boost. This recipe is for chicken cooked from scratch for adding to the ratatouille: simply replace it with the cooked turkey (or duck, or ham) and add straight to the vegetables.
Chunky ratatouille with chicken
RECIPE
Another veg-rich recipe for the post-Christmas recovery: chopped up roast, and it can again be turkey, chicken, duck or pork, with cooked rice, stuffed into red pepper halves. It’s seriously delicious.
Again, ‘chicken’ from the recipe title can be turkey or any other roast meat, shredded. Wrap it with cheese into tortillas and bake with salsa – permission to use shop-bought.
This recipe is a bit more elaborate, what with buttering all the filo layers so you can chalk that up for use with some picked, shredded and frozen Christmas turkey meat. But it’s so worth the effort!
Cold roast beef is fantastic, not just in horseradish-smeared sandwiches (though I’m definitely not knocking those). But try using it in this Thai salad, with punchy dressing and thinly cut carrots and cucumbers.
Another excellent use of roast beef is to stuff them into tacos, and I’m really only linking this particular recipe here because of the spicy sriracha mayo.
Pan de jamón, ham bread, is made in South America for Christmas but to my mind it makes sense to make it after the festivities, to use up any leftover ham. You might think it’s daunting to make pastry from scratch – if that is so, you can cut corners using shop bought puff pastry. But you’ll be missing out (and it’s not that tricky).
This one is for any cooked meat: roast pork, duck or turkey leftovers can be transformed into a lovely new dish. Rissoles with apple and cheese are quite like meatballs, only using up cooked meat.
For ‘chorizo’, read ham or bacon. This is a super quick and easy recipe, even if (unlike me) you don’t always have a bag of cooked rice in the freezer. And it’s super delicious too.
Crispy rice with chorizo and mushrooms
RECIPE
Finally, what to do with all that cheese we have been gifted? Make it into a dinner, supper, lunch, anything and bake a cheese tart. Don’t worry about that particular cheeses are stipulated in the recipe: truth be told, anything will go and will be tasty.