Give thanks for the unlikeliest of seven-layer dips.

Seven layers of Thanksgiving classics, served on toast points. © Ryan Schierling

It's the last day of November and your Thanksgiving leftovers, if there are any left over, are languishing. 

Every turkey-day legacy recipe has already been searched for and modified. There's nothing new or interesting under the waning Fall sun, and you're about to dig the remains out of the fridge and drop them into a pet dish. It's the feast he/she/it has been waiting for all along – so many hours of preparation and work, the vestiges dumped into your dog's bowl on the floor and devoured in large, breathless, indiscriminate gulps in a matter of seconds. 

Though sometimes disturbed, I am not weak and/or unimaginative in the kitchen (see this, this or this.) Chez nous, these pets, our cats, are absolutely not getting my leftovers, my legacy. Cranberries and dressing probably aren't even good for them.

If you're lucky, you should have at least a wee bit of six of these seven layers already. There is dressing, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, sweet potatoes in some form or fashion (this year we had sweet potato gratin in poblano cream), green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. The odd man out is turkey liver pate, which both utilizes some of the giblets and provides the backbone for this spread. 

Enchiladas del alma.

Chicken enchiladas with mustard greens and sweet potato mash. © Ryan Schierling

The problem with most enchiladas is that they’re unimaginative. Pick your protein, pick your sauce, cover with yellow cheese – casserole dish it up and stick it in the oven. We don’t even bother ordering enchiladas if we dine out, because most of these "pick two" formulas are terribly boring and a little pedestrian. 

What we’re doing here is offering you some other options. This version of “five days, five ways” is going to be four non-traditional enchiladas and one very traditional Tex-Mex enchilada that no one outside of Texas seems to know about but definitely should. There are no exotic elements or weird sauces, no strange fillings or garnishes, just really solid combinations that are tried and true. 

None of these are strict recipes in a controlled sense, where you take an exact amount of this and add a precise amount of that. These are just ingredients that have worked well enough together that we’ve added them to our regular rotation. We've made them so many times that they are now considered “family” preparations. 

This first recipe came out of Christmas dinner soul-food leftovers. We’d had an incredible roasted chicken, some tangy, cider vinegar-soused mustard greens and a light, fluffy sweet potato mash. The flavors mingled so perfectly together that we decided to roll it all up in a corn tortilla and give it a nice mild green sauce mixed with cream. We've since recreated that lovely Christmas dinner a number of times just to have leftovers for these enchiladas. As the filling was bits and pieces from a previous meal, there are no real quantities for a proper recipe, but I’ll walk you through it.

Hot meat dip.

Hot meat dip - queso with smoked beef brisket. © Ryan Schierling

You've all certainly heard of the Great Velveeta Shortage of 2014 by now. "Increased seasonal demand" and a shifting of production lines from one plant to another led to a shortage of the famous pasteurized prepared cheese product, especially the more moderately-sized eight- and sixteen-ounce loaves. Moderately-sized... how cute. Your Super Bowl party is screwed. 

Thankfully, here in Texas, every grocer worth their inflated sodium content has a year-round endcap with nothing but #10 cans of Ro*Tel and five-pound chubs of Velveeta. No man, woman or child will ever go without queso here because, in The Great Republic of Texas, queso is a birthright. 

Back in the Ghetto Melrose days of Seattle, hot meat dip mysteriously became a party staple. I'm not sure how it all started, but browned ground beef, Velveeta, a tin of tomatoes with green chiles and a secret mix of spices would bubble away in an ancient, volcanic crock pot next to a gigantic bowl of tortilla chips. It was easy, and it was always a hit. 

Thai green curry rice balls.

Fried jasmine rice and Thai green curry balls with crispy basil. © Ryan Schierling

Around here we use the term "legacy" when referring to the yesterday's food and its delicious potential. Most folks use the designation "leftovers" but that seems so... unseemly. In this instance, I am referring to our last post and the recipe for Thai green curry. Make it, enjoy it, and save whatever remains for these delicious Thai curry balls.

You will need about two cups of chilled curry with plenty of tofu and vegetables from our Thai Green Curry with Fresh Tofu recipe. If you have few cups of rice from the day before, you may use that, but if it has been more than a day I would recommend making a fresh batch of jasmine rice. The only other items you will need are some additional coconut milk and panko breakcrumbs. Plus oil for frying, of course.

That's it. No eggs are necessary. The tofu acts as a moist binder on the inside – not to mention it being a great source of protein – and we use coconut milk instead of eggs to prepare the balls for breading.

Whether the aim is to make yesterday's Thai curry new again, or to simply sneak a bunch of vegetables into a beloved picky eater with the allure of fried food, we're all over these little appetizers. But calling them leftovers? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Give me your ugly, your lumpy, your misshapen...

Root vegetable-creamed linguini with bacon and parsley. © Ryan Schierling

…and I will make soup of them. Now, I realize you might be thinking "Wait a minute. That's not a picture of soup at all, it looks like some creamy, cheese-drenched pasta with bacon on it." You would be partially correct. It is not soup.

But it was.

Some of the best soups in my repertoire are straight from Crescent Dragonwagon's Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook. Her Spanish-style split pea is one of my all-time favorites, and along with Hungarian Green Bean and Potato, and Cuban Black Bean, I could easily be soup-satiated all winter long. Problem is, there hasn't really been a winter this year in Austin. Sure, it's dipped into the 30s for a day or two, but most of January we enjoyed mild 70-degree days. While our friends in Seattle were getting eight inches of snow last week, we were wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, harvesting lettuce and spinach from our garden. But this month's Snowmageddon in the Pacific Northwest made me remember another Seattle snow day... oh, way back in January of ought-seven.

"With flurries predicted for the following day, I made a list before I went to bed.

A turkey Hajj (or "pilgrimage to Mecca").

Open-faced hot turkey sandwich. © Ryan Schierling

I'm totally with you, internets! We don't need 400 new recipes to create from Thanksgiving leftovers. We know that the best way to eat them is just to eat them. Sometimes, it's only a matter of reconfiguring them on the plate. This particular arrangement happens to be my favorite.

My story begins in a wonderfully gritty little dive bar/café – Mecca Cafe. It is this establishment that I have to thank for my sincere appreciation of turkey. Located in the heart of Seattle's Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, it is a stone's throw from the Space Needle and was walking distance from our old place. It is every bit as unpretentious and personable as its motto, which reads, "Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929." Split into two separate spaces, they serve stiff drinks on one side and offer rock-solid comfort food on the other, in true old-diner style.

And I know I am not the only one to have found delicious respite in their particular style of open-faced hot turkey sandwich.

"On a bad day, one of their good greasy breakfasts or the hot open-faced turkey sandwich might just save your life." - The Stranger, Dec 13, 2007

Most Thanksgivings I have had the opportunity to eat turkey, but most of those years I took a pass on the bird. My general opinion was that eating turkey just wasted stomach space for the really yummy things on the holiday menu, like mashed potatoes with dressing and gravy. And pie.

But one fateful day nine years ago, months away from any gratitude-based festivities, I made the acquaintance of the open-faced hot turkey sandwich at Mecca. I was smitten. Thick slices of egg bread, 1/8" cuts of turkey breast that pulled apart easily with a fork, and a fluffy heap of mashed potatoes all generously drenched in warm delicious gravy… sigh… a revelation.

I don't recall if someone recommended it to me that day, or if I ordered it on a whim. I'm not even sure if I was alone or with a friend. All I remember is that it was a turning-point. I was eating the most amazing turkey plate I had ever eaten in my life and realizing that this was what a holiday meal involving turkey aspired to be. Oh, the gratitude!

There's nothing fancy at all about a hot turkey sandwich. It's a straightforward layering of sliced turkey over bread, snugged up to a pile of mashed potatoes, then all topped with turkey gravy and served with a big spoonful of cranberry sauce. But each element is important; flimsy honey-wheat bread, dried out Butterball®, rehydrated Idaho® Spuds™ and generic gravy from a jar are NOT going to give you the same sandwich. Also, the cranberry sauce had better be fresh because the gelatinous kind from a can will never deliver that wonderful sweet-tart sensation of a whole cranberry bursting between your teeth.

This year we planned for having adequate leftovers. All the extra home-cooked goodies for this meal were waiting in the refrigerator: roasted turkey, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and cranberry sauce made with fruity cabernet. Bread was the only additional item we had to buy to make this – which actually worked out perfectly for us since we'd already gobbled down the sourdough dressing. Now that we're living in Texas, we decided to try it with a loaf of Texas Toast instead of egg bread. Because of its similarly-thick slices and light texture, it was a satisfying facsimile of the real deal. 

There are a thousand ways to dress up, dress down, and devour those Thanksgiving leftovers, but few more simple than this – unless you're eating things cold right out of the fridge. It is also the most turkey this quasi-vegetarian will probably ever eat off of one plate at a meal. Spicy pumpkin and smoked turkey risotto be damned. This weekend I'm going to have to insist on a hot turkey sandwich.

It's not leftovers, it's legacy.

Noodling with chicken noodle. © Ryan Schierling

Be it an intentional challenge, due to economic necessity, or simple unwillingness to make another trip to the grocery store, all of us have had the experience of cooking something for dinner using only what we had on hand. From the bits and scraps left over from recent meals or odds and ends in the pantry, you aspire to prepare something you might actually want to eat. Sometimes an old standby is the end result of pillaging the pantry and other times a novel "one-off" meal emerges. On occasion, one of these creations will even be so scrumptious as to become a family favorite.

But this was not one of those resplendent times. No, this was really just Chicken Noodle... uh, pasta.

It was delicious and easy, but this was primarily an effort to use what was left of an excellent grilled chicken. While I may not be much of a meat eater, I do believe it is important to not be wasteful when a critter is sacrificed for our table. The other elements I rounded up from the fridge, pantry and herb garden… a couple of carrots and some onion, a small bag of pappardelle (extra back-up pasta we had on hand from Easter in case the homemade pasta wasn't enough), and some fresh rosemary and thyme from the garden.

Is this starting to sound like an easy game of "Stump the Cook" on The Splendid Table?

Let's face it, what we have here are the discernible makings of a simple chicken noodle soup. But it didn't feel like a "soup" kind of night; pasta sounded far more appealing than a steaming bowl of flavorful broth with noodles. So, I just started sautéing the vegetables and fresh herbs like I would for a soup, then added a wee bit of flour to make a blonde roux before adding chicken broth a little at a time. When I achieved a light sauce I added the chicken, brought it up to bubbling, seasoned (mmm… cracked black pepper) and tossed it with the cooked pasta.

Soup can be made from just about anything… pick a vegetable or two, choose a savory stock or just water, add a bit of meat, perhaps, or maybe a little cream, and seasonings to suit your taste. (Heck, you could even puree leftover casserole and water with a stick blender and turn that into a soup!) So really, why not adapt a favorite into a pasta sauce? It may not turn out to be a recipe you make again and again, but, thanks to some persuasion from a fast approaching expiration date and a little imagination, it will likely make for a wonderful weeknight take on something you already enjoy. Buh-bye leftovers, hello extra room in the fridge!

What have you come up with on a night when legacy was "what's for dinner?"