Christmas Leftovers, Boxing Day 2017

Have you ever noticed how leftovers recipes seem to grow the food mountain?  For me, I love my Christmas lunch so much I use up my leftovers by having Christmas dinner again on Boxing Day!  This is what we used to do at home – with some more vegetables being cooked to make up any shortfall, thus using up some of the raw vegetables still lurking!

Looking through my fridge today, I could still feed four people!  Meanwhile, on the worktop I’ve still about 450 grams of uncooked Brussels sprouts and 400 grams of uncooked carrots I bought in for Christmas dinner too. Serving just a single serving of food yesterday that means I’ve still easily got another Christmas dinner in there – and why would I want to “use up” those ingredients by adding MORE ingredients … which would make the food mountain larger!

• I could make a Christmas vegetables pasty – by adding pastry.  I deliberately didn’t buy pastry this year, so I wasn’t tempted.
• I could form everything into little rissoles and bake bubble and squeak style potato cakes.  But to serve these requires additional food to be added!
• I could take the leftover turkey and produce a quick curry – but there’ll still be plenty of leftover turkey to do this in the coming days.
• I could make some bubble and squeak scotch eggs!  I’ve enough leftover sprouts and mash, as well as eggs in the kitchen, but so soon after Christmas Day I don’t fancy these yet!  Maybe by the weekend.

Indeed, there is no shortage of leftovers recipes to be found – the problem with the majority of leftovers recipes is they seem to actually generate MORE food, not less.  Also, it chews up more of that essential relaxation time generating more mess in the kitchen to wash up – so why’d I do that?  It doesn’t make sense does it.

So, for today, I’m going to have another Christmas lunch!  I’ve plenty of leftover turkey, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, nut roast, stuffing and mashed potatoes, which can be microwaved hot – I’ll just need to cook another carrot and Brussels sprouts and add a Yorkshire pudding from the freezer!

There, it’s done – because nobody wants to add MORE food to the leftovers pile.  It simply doesn’t make sense does it.  Having spent hours making my turkey dinner, to serve a single serving, I’m not prepared to “just let it go” and become something else.  No – it’s Christmas lunch version 2 here for me!