Long Live Leftovers!

It is a well-known fact that the very best part of a Thanksgiving day feast are the leftovers that, if you're lucky, last more than a week!  Every November I look forward to at least a week of turkey in all it's variable creative, culinary reincarnations.  And don't even get me started on the mashed potates, yams, gravy, stuffing and the pies...Oh, the pies!  Eating my second Thanksgiving feast on Friday, before the pickings get slim, requiring a bit more preparation, is my second favorite meal of the year. 

And yet, the term "leftovers" in Spain is almost derogatory.  I think I have offended more than one person in my time here by offering to prepare them a plate of sobras.  It's as if I were suggesting that they somehow weren't good enough for the "real" food.  Or perhaps it's a matter of pride?  Sobras in Spanish carries the connotation of the unwanted remnants, which isn't the case at all with the English word.  Although, pondering linguistic dilema, the English teacher in me concludes that the meaning can be similar to Spanish in cases when the word is accompanied by the definite article "the".  There is a differnce between giving some leftovers and giving the leftovers.  Grammar aside, my mind is still boggled by this cultural difference, even after ten years here, and so I wanted to briefly blog in honor of the beauty represented by a refridgerator full of leftovers!

Our bird this year was exraordinarily large: 11.5k or 25lbs.  That is a big turkey even by U.S. butterball standards; in Spain it's virtually unheard of.  I was honestly worried that it wouldn't fit in my oven.  Angelines glibly suggested cutting off the thighs and cooking them separately if it came down to it--a thought which completely horrified me, of course.  In the end I was able to tuck it together nicely and it fit on the lowest rack in my little Spanish oven scraping the sides and just missing the top by less than a centimeter.  It was a close call, to say the least.

Needless to say, this year I was much more generous doling out the turkey to our guests.  In general Spaniards refuse to take leftovers from joint meals.  It seems the unspoken rule is "host takes all".  Even when you bring a plate of something, it would be terrible manners to take what hasn't been eaten back home with you.  Usually after some obligatory heckling and repeated polite refusals I can get people to take SOME of what they've brought home with them, but inevitably I am left with much more food than I bargained for. 

My covetous, glutonous instinct as a food lover, is of course to delight in the fact that I can keep all the spoils to myself and not be seen as a stingy pig!  But this year, in light of our huge turkey, I was legitimately concerned I wouldn't be able to eat all the possible leftovers; there are only three of us, after all.  Nor do I have endless freezer space to store food for longer periods of time, so I was more insistant than ever that people take leftover turkey, etc. home with them.   

When all was said and done, I still had a large plate piled high with cuts of breast and thigh, and of course the carcass was all mine.  I always make a batch of broth with half the bones and freeze half to make more in a few months' time.  This year, I made broth and was able to divide the rest of the carcass into two parts to make broth two more times.  I am elated.  Turkey soup is perhaps the highlight of the winter months, as far as I'm concerned. 

My creativity with turkey was more limited than in past years.  Aside from our second Thanksgiving, we ate turkey soup twice in the week and a delicious turkey curry pie I made up with,you guessed it!, leftover pie crust.  But I also savoured turkey on my morning tostadas for a full week.  My only other moment of inspiration with Thanksgiving leftovers came when faced with two small bowls of cranberry relish.

My mom brought me a few cans of whole cranberries when she and my dad came here for Thanksgiving the year Emily was born.  I used the last one this year.  At home, my mom always buys OceanSpray fresh cranberries and makes a mean no-cook cranberry relish...but cranberries are hard to come by in Spain, since they are not grown here and so I have learned to make a suitable cranberry sauce of my own with whatever I can get.  The first year I was here I used current berries, but since then I have always had a some shipment or hand-delivery (my favorite) from the States to help make this most typical of Thanksgiving garnishes.

I made two different cranberry sauces this year.  One more similar to my mom's with orange and walnut, and one that caught my eye on the can.  It was a sort of compote, I suppose.  Apple, onion, orange zest and cranberries simmer together until the apple is soft, then you add ginger, cinnamon and allspice--fantastic.  It was the apple-cranberry sauce gave me the idea.  After my turkey pie I still had a little extra crust and I am loathe to throw anything away if I can avoid it.  I rolled it out and put it in a mini pie tin I have, then chopped up some more apple and mixed it with the cranberry sauces to make a pie filling.  I must say, my cran-apple pie was outstanding.  I highly recommend it to any of you looking for ways to make use of extra cranberry sauce after next year's Thanksgiving.

Well there you have it, the nitty-gritty of post-Thanksgiving goings-on in my kitchen: Long Live Leftovers!! ;)