Amazing

I made 16 turkey enchiladas and froze them. Lemme know if anyone needs the recipe.

@SanFranLefty: I do – interesting to see what the leftover duck meat tastes like in an enchilada. Post away …

@SanFranLefty: If you start singing Turkey Lurkey Time during defrost you may cause a Show-Tune Queen Riot and Spontaneous Neighborhood Floor Show. The California Highway Patrol doesn’t make a warning sign large enough.

@blogenfreude: This is going to be hard, because I use muscle memory to make the enchiladas, based upon my mom teaching the recipe when I was 8 (but there is no actual recipe, and I vary upon the meat or whether meat is used at all). This is a close approximation of what I did on Friday. All quantities are approximate. You need a 9 by 13 pyrex dish, and a deep frying pan. I can’t send you pictures, because all I have are cylinders of two enchiladas wrapped in aluminum foil

SFL’s Leftover Turkey Enchiladas

Ingredients:
2 medium white onions, diced
5 garlic cloves, diced (adjust for tolerance)
2 cans of anchoEmbasa brand chipolte chiles in the adobo sauce (adjust depending upon your tolerance for spice), chipoltes chopped and sauce reserved
2 cans of enchilada sauce
2 roasted poblano chiles, peeled and seeded (adjust for spice tolerance)
approx. 3-4 cups of left over Thanksgiving turkey meat, dark and white, all the pieces torn off the weird parts of the bird
1 can black beans, drained
1 bag or head of spinach
16 soft taco tortillas (I prefer flour over corn because I’m from Texas and they’re easier to roll)
sour cream
shredded cheese (more the better)
red chile flakes, powdered cumin, paprika, black pepper (optional, all depending on tolerance)
black olives, sliced (optional)
jalapenos, sliced (optional)

Instructions:
Brown the onions and garlic in olive oil over medium-high heat until translucent, approx. 5-8 minutes. Add the chiles and cook for about a minute. Lower heat to medium, add the reserved adobo sauce, enchilada sauce, turkey meat, black beans, and stir. Add enough water (I like to add the water to the enchilada sauce can to get all the goodness) to cover the meat. Keep stirring until it comes to a boil. Lower heat to simmer, toss in spinach, and cover. Check on it and stir it occasionally, adding spices per your taste buds, for as long as you want to break down the fibers of the turkey meat. I have cooked meat off a chicken as long as an hour – it depends upon your will power. Add water as needed. Drain off the fluid on the meat mixture and reserve.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Get ready to assemble the enchiladas. Nuke the tortillas for 30 seconds to soften them up. Make a set up of having the tortillas, the meat and spinach mixture, the shredded cheese, sour cream, and jalapenos/olives.

Spray the pyrex dish with Pam, and cover a thin layer of the reserve meat-juice on the bottom. Assemble the enchiladas by putting in the meat (using a strainy-spoon, generally one-spoonful), cheese, etc. in to a tortilla, and roll up the tortilla and place in the pyrex dish. This is a real test of measuring and distributing the ingredients so you have enough. Repeat eight times, until the entire bottom of the Pyrex dish is covered with rolled up tortillas. Top the layer with the reserved meat juice, dollops of sour cream, and shredded cheese (and olives/jalapenos). Repeat enchilada assembly and make a second layer on top of the first layer, and again smother with reserved meat juice, sour cream, cheese, etc.

Put in the oven and bake for approx 20 minutes, until the cheese is melted and bubbling. Remove, let it rest for a few minutes, and serve up. Some people prefer the crustier top layer enchiladas to the softer bottom layer enchiladas. I am democratic and always have one of each.

I took all the leftovers and made meal packs of two enchiladas per aluminum foil and stuck them in the freezer. You can heat the packets up pretty quickly in the oven, or remove in the morning from the freezer, let defrost in the fridge during the day, and nuke for a lunch.

¡Buen provecho!

@SanFranLefty: How can I thank you? I’ve got about that much duck meat frozen, so I can totally do this. Expect photos and serious reportage …

@blogenfreude: Isn’t duck greasier than turkey? You may need to drain off some fat during the meat-stewing phase. I look forward to seeing how the Tex-Mex recipe adapts to French-style duck in a Noo Yawk City kitchen… ;-)

SFL – I had to log on to thank you. Too late for me to use this year but I copied to my recipe file for the future. Your name is in the title of this one and the Cranberry relish.

We served 18 guests and I cooked 2 birds. Made a couple gallons of soup Saturday without going to the store for anything. Threw in everything I could find and would have included that extra casserole of stuffing but couldn’t find it in the fridge. Figured Mrs Lurker gave to her family on Thursday until I located it in the oven later on Saturday. Thursday was a pretty hectic day.

Most of what I cook is pretty basic and for odd recipes I have never made, I’ll read 3 or 4 on the internet and wing it based on that. I really screwed up the cranberry nut stuffing that I made for the vegans (too many cranberries) but added sugar to recover. That did the trick and that stuffing was wiped out. The apple/sausage stuffing that I more or less have a recipe for was the best I have ever made but there was plenty left over. (It broke my heart to find the full casserole 2 days later).

@DElurker: I’ve already made a few edits since I originally posted it, but you’re welcome. I’m glad to hear you tried the cranberries too. Mr. SFL’s stuffing recipe he got from Williams-Sonoma is too ambitious for my tastes. Apple sausage stuffing sounds yummy. That cranberry relish is always a hit – I make it three times a year: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and I’m lucky to have leftovers.

Mr. SFL is currently using up some more turkey tonight for dinner in a Burmese curry stir-fry with onions, tofu, various vegetables, leftover cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, and spices with labels that are in a curlicue language.

Where’s PromNight and his food pron? I’m sure he has some good leftovers recipes.

ADD: You don’t have to wait until next Turkey Day to make the enchiladas. Just sub in a different type of meat (shredded chicken, ground beef, whatever), or no meat at all (use mushrooms instead for vegetarians). I make a batch of enchiladas about once a month, freeze the leftovers, and we eat them as needed. Healthier than the Trader Joe’s frozen meals. Maybe.

Thanksgiving Soup or Fuck Tupperware

this sounds disgusting, but i promise you, it’s fabulous!

put the turkey carcass into a big soup pot with a coarsly chopped onion. boil an hour or so.
remove the bones, all the meat should be off.

THROW EVERYTHING LEFTOVER INTO THE POT
vegetables, potatoes, stuffingballs, cranberry sause and gravy, everything. whatever traditional fare you served that’s left.
NOT dessert!

simmer till ingredients infuse and onlookers come out of shock.
seriously, it’s great.

I’m making frijoles y chicos con jamon (pinto beans and dried corn with ham) with my big ol’ ham bone. I think all we got is a few bits of leftover turkey. We had some awesome sammiches when we came in all covered in dirt and sawdust from getting a truck load of firewood out in the western hills on Saturday.

I forgot to get Mrs RML’s evergreen boughs yesterday, so I thought I’d do that when I went pistol shooting today. A storm was blowing in over the desert, however, which made for a big dust storm with really high cold winds. Got to my top secret spot and was dismayed to see that others had found it and had been shooting clays out there. Fuck. It was so cold that I just subbed out my camo UNM Lobos baseball cap for a fleece hat, grabbed my REI folding saw out of the truck and got a juniper bough covered with blue berries. Called it a day and came back in.