Tomorrow, as I dig into the roast turkey, the corn-bread stuffing, the hominy casserole, the mashed potatoes and gravy, I also will be thinking about how good these dishes will taste at the many eating opportunities stretched over the weekend.
I do bow before the golden bird on Thanksgiving Day. But shortly thereafter, I crave that cold turkey sandwich on rye with a little horseradish and mayonnaise. Leftover stuffing, always in short supply in our house, is a treasure, especially when topped with a little warm gravy. The potatoes that appeared in their mashed splendor during the main meal reappear as flat but savory pancakes at lunch a day or two later.
The plethora of pies, which I couldn't finish off on Thursday, provides welcome company over the long weekend. I have discovered that if you are the first one out of bed on Friday morning, you can revel in that rare early-morning trio of solitude, a hot cup of coffee and a slice of minced meat pie for breakfast.
In addition to cleaning off my plate on Thanksgiving, I believe in picking the turkey carcass clean in the days that follow the feast. That dark meat on the bottom of the bird is an outstanding late-night snack.
Sometimes my wife and I toss the picked-over turkey carcass into a pot of water, add a lot of vegetables, and make soup. We did that recently, as a warm-up to Thanksgiving, adding a bunch of kale to a mix of onions, carrots and turkey bones. The result was a good pot of soup and a long bout of feeling virtuous.
Recently, I experimented with another leftover dish, turkey hash. Turkey hash has been around, I suspect, since Squanto met the Pilgrims.
The recipe I tried came from a veteran cook, the late Julia Child. The recipe in The Way to Cook was said to be "old-fashioned," and that sounded appealing to me.
It began with an interesting twist, marinating the bits of turkey meat in a bath of lemon juice, herbs and olive oil. This bath, I guess, was supposed to give the turkey new life.
Next, I sauted some onions in a large frying pan and eventually added the turkey, along with cooked potatoes, peas and various liquids, including some cream, into the frying pan.
The idea, Julia said in her cookbook instructions, was to get a good crust on the bottom of the pan, then stir the crust into the body of the hash, and cook the mixture until more crusts develop.
I came up a little short in the crust department. I cooked up a couple of them, but my hash never did reach the acclaimed state of "crusty outside and tender savory inside" that Julia said I should shoot for.
Nonetheless, it was really good turkey hash. It added yet another dish to my ever-lengthening list of Thanksgiving leftovers.