This year I made a big, fat boo-boo. I had in mind to fix a ham for dinner. Ham is something we rarely have, so it sounded appealing—a treat in this year that has been no treat. So I bought a ham. Jack, at nearly the same time, said that a local grocery had turkey thighs and breasts on sale. Since he doesn’t like white meat and I don’t care for dark, and there are only two of us, so we didn’t need a whole bird, that seemed like a great solution. Without conscious thought, we ended up with both turkey and ham for Thanksgiving dinner. Talk about a plethora of goodness! We’ll have a little of each for dinner and then I will cut and package the rest to use in leftovers or to freeze.
So for ham leftovers, I’ll make bean soup, ham and potato soup, 
ham and mac & cheese, and of course sandwiches. But with the turkey I’ll make turkey pot pie. Here’s my recipe, give or take. I kinda make it up as I go along but this is a reasonable facsimile. I make two—one with white meat and one with dark. I know, I know. I spoil the man but what can I say? I love him.
TURKEY POT PIE
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F
Filling:
- 3 cups (or so) of cubed turkey
- 4 carrots (peel if you like. I don’t) roughly chopped
- 1 med onion, roughly chopped
- 2-3 celery sticks, sliced
- 8 oz mushrooms, sliced
- 1 cup peas
Sauce:
- 6 Tbl butter
- 6 Tbl flour
- 4 cups chicken/turkey stock
- 1-2 cups milk, heated until warm
Crust:
Enough dough for top and bottom crust (you’ll have too much for a regular old pie plate. I use a large casserole dish for the white meat pie and a pie plate for the dark meat. This recipe makes a lot!)
Instructions:
- Sauté celery, carrots, and onion until soft. Add mushrooms and continue until they give up their liquid.
- Add salt and pepper to taste if desired. I don’t add either but that’s just us.
- Set aside.
- Melt butter in a 4 quart pan.
- Add flour and stir for about two minutes, cooking the flour and making a roux.
- Add stock, whisking as you do to avoid lumps.
- Just when the sauce starts to thicken, add milk and whisk until thick and smooth.
- Remove from heat.
- Add the peas.
- Add remaining vegetables and meat and stir to mix. (This is where I divide the mixture to add the different types of meat.)
- In your baking dish(es), place the bottom pie crust. (Okay, I’ll confess to using Pillsbury…)
- Pour in the filling with sauce and top with the second crust. Crimp the edges closed. Slice two or three holes to release steam.
- Bake for about 30-40 minutes, until the crust turns golden and some of the filling shows around the slits.
- Let cool 10-15 minutes and then spoon out into a bowl.
I cover with foil and refrigerate for several days. It gets better and better!
What is your favorite holiday leftover recipe?
Hoping your holidays were–and continue to be–wonderful!
Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.
Burning Bridges by Anne Krist
One Woman Only
Only a Good Man Will Do
Naval Maneuvers
Someone asked me a while back if my book, Burning Bridges, was romance or women’s lit? She said the description sounded like women’s lit, and she doesn’t review that genre. Gosh, this was something I hadn’t considered before. I thought of my book as romance. I think of women’s lit as centered around a woman and how she solves her life problems, but with elements of romance. In fact, so many books I read as “women’s lit” were actually (in my mind) romances. The woman’s problem was so often being alone (after a long-term breakup or a failed marriage) and finding a new partner while solving her problems. I fail to see how that is different from most romances.
there is very little romance or bonding with someone else? Is that women’s lit? 
Second Chance blurb:
While I know that eating healthy is best for all of us, and it’s darn hard to eat healthy and not cook the food yourself, I still like food that someone else cooks, serves up, and lets me eat at home without all the hubbub of preparation and clean-up. Plus, timing is always right. There’s no having the potatoes done at one time and the meat done at another. If necessary, I can stick the carry out container in to be zapped and have everything hot and ready at once.
restaurant, and their chicken parmesan is fantastic! For that dish alone, I’d have to say that’s our favorite and most used takeaway restaurant. When things were locked down pretty tightly, we could call in our order and they would bring it out to the car. Yummy!
There was a time, in the long ago, when our only choice was to read “real” books. That is to hold an actual thing bound as a hardback or paperback. We had to hold the book open—sometimes to press it to keep it open—and keep it at the proper reading height. Sometimes those tomes were heavy. Sometimes the binding was such that it took real effort to keep the book open and we creased the spines. If we dropped the book, we lost our place. We couldn’t easily prop it open to read while we ate, or we had to hold the book open one-handed if we wanted to drink a cup of coffee. Those days ended for me when hubby bought me an ebook reader for Christmas. I’ve hardly had a better gift!
books to lug around. Then you need places to put them. Now I can carry the equivalent of those boxes on one Kindle. Granted, actual books won’t run out of power in the middle of a chapter and have to be recharged, but the convenience of my Kindle outweighs the inconvenience.
When Jack and I lived in a small town in Virginia, we routinely drove in and out of Richmond and Charlottesville (50 miles and 35 miles respectively) for grocery shopping, plays, dinner, work, etc. and never gave a thought that we were driving those distances on two-lane country roads WITHOUT A DARN CELL PHONE. In fact, there weren’t any cell phones back then. Sure, the thought of breaking down crossed my mind, but houses weren’t spaced out too far, and I just figured I’d walk to one of them and call for help. Now that I have a cell phone? I can’t drive half a mile from home without panicking if I discover I’ve forgotten the phone. I’ve turned into a phone wuss, and I’m not proud of it.
smart phones were out. “You have the oldest phone of anyone I know,” a friend once told me. I smacked the lid down on the screen and said, “I use my phone for making calls. I don’t need all that stuff that comes on smart phones.” Sigh. Or for the naivete! Of course, as soon as I got a smart phone I set up weather, Google, a news app, and Solitaire. I am picking the phone up a hundred times a day to do something on it that doesn’t involve making a call.
I should qualify that title. I’m for the sunshine, if I can watch it from behind a window. I’m not fussy about where that window is—could be in the house or in the car or a restaurant or… You get the idea. Suffice it to say, like Scarlett, I’ve always been one to watch my complexion. Why? Because I burn in nothing flat. Plus, I’m not much of an outdoors person. Plus 2, sunshine means bugs. Flying bugs, crawling bugs, all kinds of bugs. Nope. Not for me. But I am happy to open the blinds and curtains and “Let the sunshine. Let the sunshine in, the sunshine in!” (Courtesy of the 7th Dimension)
the sunshine, it is during the fall. My favorite season, it always seems as though the sky is bluer, the breezes brisker, and the sun most welcome during the autumn. Maybe because we know winter is coming? At any rate, being outside in September, October, or November is a treat. I’ll take the sunshine then, thanks very much!
How Charity Sunday works: for every comment made on this blog post, I will donate money to the charity named. The same promise is made for every blog site listed in the group–click the Linky Links link at the bottom of this post to see the list of participants and read/comment on any of them to see a donation go to that blogger’s charity. We’re all different! Thanks for your help and your participation!
