Alternative Ideas for T-Day Leftovers

HELP! I CAN’T REMEMBER MY PASSWORDS

By Neil Offen
Columnist

The real problem with Thanksgiving? Not all the cooking and the spilled gravy and the awkward political conversations around the dining table. It’s all the leftovers, of course.

What to do with all that extra food? Here are some suggestions beyond the turkey sandwiches and the turkey soup and the sweet potato meatballs and the cranberry hash and the green bean biscuits and the turkey tetrazzini (which is the Italian word for acute gastritis): 

Turkey frisbees. Pound 12 ounces of turkey scraps into the shape of a thin round disc. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and bake for 2 hours, or until the smoke alarm goes off. Fling them into your neighbor’s yard and then hide behind your leftover string beans.

Open-faced sweet-potato green-bean spicy-sausage Waldorf ham salad. In a large mixing bowl, blend at high speed any ingredients that haven’t yet turned moldy. Taste carefully. Spit out. Make an appointment with your gastroenterologist.

Alternatively, offer the whole thing to someone named Waldorf.

French-fried turkey legs with leftover giblet stuffing. Chop the giblets until they no longer resemble giblets. Stuff them in an old suitcase. Send it to France, where they can fry it.

Crunchy bathroom grout. Combine the jellied cranberry sauce with the surplus pan gravy and the last remaining burnt-to-a-crisp slice of pumpkin pie. Stir until the consistency just before it resembles something that will make you retch. Drain into a baster you will never use again. Squeeze the baster to apply the grout to repair the shower stall in the upstairs bathroom.

Works best if you never intend to use that bathroom. Also, put your house on the market.

Cheesy carrot stuffing hotcake quiches. A perfect breakfast pick-me-up that will keep you on your holiday diet and prevent you from eating food for the rest of the holidays. Bring some to the emergency room while you wait for triage.

Open-faced smoked turkey cigarillos. Completely gluten-free and very good for repairing the garage door or for bringing to a holiday potluck at work if you intend to retire soon.

Gravy baths. After the shower stall is fixed, fill the bathtub with extra pan juices and assorted drippings. Simmer until summer.

When the liquid has congealed enough that it is no longer liquid, see if anything floats, including that particularly annoying cousin who brought a bottle of off-brand Mello Yello as his contribution to the big meal.

Jellied cranberry wireless drones. Excellent for breakfast, lunch, dinner or small-scale invasions.

Carrboro resident Neil Offen has been a humor columnist for more than four decades and on two continents. He is the author of “Building a Better Boomer,” available wherever books are sold.