So you’ve survived another Thanksgiving with your crazy family. Hopefully, your level of traumatization was at a minimum on Turkey Day and none of your fam announced their allegiance to the Proud Boys or ISIS. No one wants to find out Based Stickman is their Uncle Kyle or that the next Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is their cousin Franklin. It’s been a rough year for a lot of people and we could really use some good in our lives right around now.
Fortunately, we can count on at least one thing about the day being good: the food. The beautifully browned and still juicy turkey with all of the sides that find their way onto the dinner table is truly a feast. It’s a perfect portrait of American gluttony at its best. On this day, we eat far too much. We eat until all we can manage to do is fart and snore ourselves to sleep watching TV on the couch in our sweatpants at 9 p.m. It’s like our brains know we are going to need some extra rest, because tomorrow we are going to have to figure out what to do with all of these leftovers!
There are so many different ways you can go with Thanksgiving leftovers. The possibilities are truly endless. There are however, also things you should definitely not do with your horde of Thanksgiving eats. For starters, you should probably not horde your leftovers. You can’t eat 5 pounds of turkey by yourself before it goes bad, so get into the spirit of the holiday and encourage your guests to take home some food of their own so they can partake in the Thanksgiving leftover shuffle along with you.
So what should you do with all of that leftover turkey meat? The obvious choice is to just make a plate of leftovers and live the dream all over again, but there are other options. There is never a better time than now to make a glorious sandwich with as many items from your Thanksgiving dinner plate as you can stack on top of a crusty piece of bread. Go ahead, make Dagwood proud! If you want to get away from the usual, go Mexican with some turkey tacos, enchiladas or tamales, or head to Italy and have a little turkey tetrazzini.
What you shouldn’t do is feed it to the wild turkeys around your home in some sort of weird forced cannibalism thing. First of all, wild turkeys are dangerous. Longtime readers know my feelings on these feathered menaces; they are despicable. My opinion of them has only gotten worse since I last wrote about them. I walked out of my house to find one of them standing on the hood of my car the other day. Now they want to learn how to drive!
If you are wondering why I wouldn’t want to feed those turkey-lurkey bastards their own rotten flesh, it’s because I am worried about making them worse. Feeding them their own brethren could lead to a turkey-based variant of mad cow disease, in which case we are all fucked, or to some other mutation that ultimately makes them an unstoppable force. Do you want to be a slave to a mutant turkey with big muscles and the brain of … well … a bird? I didn’t think so.
When the big pieces of meat are gone and you are left with the turkey carcass and the neck and giblets that came stuffed inside, you might be inclined to throw it all out, but you really shouldn’t. All of them funky turkey leavings can go into a big pot to make a delicious soup. You’ll need some carrots, onions, celery, bay leaves and thyme, along with some salt and pepper and water to get your broth going, but if you cooked Thanksgiving dinner, you probably already have all of that shit, so get on it. Once the broth is up to snuff, throw in some noodles, rice or barley to make it official. Your soup will freeze beautifully in case you want to save it for later. When you come down with the flu after hanging around all those grubby people at the mall on Black Friday, that bowl of soup will be there to nurse you back to health.
What you should not do with all of those turkey bones is make predictions about the future. Bone reading, or bone divination, is for trained professionals only and should not be attempted by amateurs. All it takes is one misreading and you’ll end up dead instead of receiving that major award you were so sure you’d win. It’s also a bad idea to try and guess what you will be getting for Christmas. Santa don’t play that shit, and he might end up sending his spokes-thug Sean Hannity to wack you. The war on Christmas is real and about to be underway. It’s going to be a long slog, so I hope you saved some turkey soup!
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