Month: November 2010

Shells Stuffed with Thanksgiving Leftovers

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Pasta, Recipes

You are probably thinking that pasta shells stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers sounds pretty weird.  And that the ingredients (leftovers, mayo, and cream/mozzarella/parmesan cheeses) don’t look very appetizing.  We thought the same thing.  But, lucky for you, we decided to try it anyway and discovered a delicious and easy way to use up Thanksgiving leftovers.  We found the recipe on allrecipes.com, one of our favorite recipe sites.  We read a lot of the reviews from people who had tried the recipe and discovered that most of them were excellent, so we figured the recipe was worth trying.   We were not disappointed — the recipe is an interesting way to combine our favorite Thanksgiving flavors (gravy, turkey and stuffing) into a somewhat lighter meal that didn’t result in the usual Turkey Day food coma. Continue reading “Shells Stuffed with Thanksgiving Leftovers”

Tex-Mex Turkey Soup (with leftover turkey)

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

We tried to find some out-of-the-ordinary recipes for our leftover turkey this year.  This soup recipe is amazing and definitely different.  It’s very similar to a chicken tortilla soup — hearty with tomato and complex flavors, but with diced up turkey instead of chicken.  Really good, and something new to try if you get tired of turkey sandwiches.  Since we were only cooking for the two of us, we prepared a half recipe. Continue reading “Tex-Mex Turkey Soup (with leftover turkey)”

Thanksgiving Prep

Posted By under Reviews

Thanksgiving is perhaps the biggest foodie day of the year.  Everyone sits down for a turkey day feast with certain expectations about the food, which can create a huge amount of pressure for the cook — given that the meal is largely the focus of the entire holiday.  There are so many dishes that *need* to be on the plate to make the meal a success, and the timing of getting all of these different parts of the meal to come together perfectly and at the right time can be intimidating.  But we spent a good bit of our weekend carefully planning for the big day, and we think we are ready!

As you may know, the way we are able to cook so often here at FoodieLawyer is because we always try to plan ahead.  You may not know, however, that I’m a list-maker.  The above photo shows just 4 of our lists so far to get ready for the big day.  Two grocery lists (one for Central Market, the other for the regular grocery store), a list of all the food items we’ll be serving and a list of Big Things that need to be done each day leading up to Thursday.  Not pictured are my separate to-do list (non-food related items) and Dan’s Thanksgiving Day timeline, only because we haven’t finished them yet (add those items to the list of Big Things to be done!) Continue reading “Thanksgiving Prep”

Baked Chicken Chiles Relleno (with leftover chicken)

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

We have a little garden at home and this is our second season of attempting to grow some of our own food.  Certain “crops” fared better than others, especially this summer when it was so hot.  We ended up with quite a few poblano peppers and have been looking for recipes to use them.  One of our favorite Tex-Mex places has a really good baked chicken chile relleno, so we decided to attempt to recreate it, using our very own homegrown peppers.  We also thought it would be a good use of leftover chicken.  Continue reading “Baked Chicken Chiles Relleno (with leftover chicken)”

Simple Roasted Chicken

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

We don’t roast chicken often enough.  It’s a really easy and inexpensive way to get several meals out of one protein.  We have tried roasted chicken lots of different ways, but recently found the most simple way yet, that was also the most delicious we have tried so far.  Rather than stuffing the cavity with anything, applying a rub to the outer skin, or adding compound butter under the skin (all methods we have tried in the past), we just trussed the chicken, generously seasoned it with dried thyme, salt & pepper and roasted it in a cast-iron skillet in the oven.  Seriously simple, and super delicious. Continue reading “Simple Roasted Chicken”

Celery Salad

Posted By under Main Ingredient, Side Dishes, Vegetable

We recently tried a new side dish from Ina Garten’s latest cookbook “How Easy is That?”  We have to say, it was pretty darn easy.  And delicious.  So good, in fact, that we are going to serve it at Thanksgiving this year.  Celery salad is not something we ever would have thought to make, but as Ina recognizes, celery can serve as a starring role and should not always be relegated to tuna salad support.  This is definitely a side dish we will keep in the rotation. Continue reading “Celery Salad”