Wednesday, December 2, 2015

All those leftovers

You've probably seen recipes galore for Thanksgiving leftovers...

But what if what's left over isn't a turkey, but a veggie roast?

Last week I shared the nut loaf my daughter and I made last year. It was heavenly. This year she wanted to try something different. It was called a nut loaf, but it was much lighter on the nuts and heavier on the vegetables.

I took pictures as we went.

First we assembled the lentil and brown rice mixture.


In a separate pan, we sauteed shredded carrots, celery, mushrooms, red onion, and shredded kale.


Then everything got blended together.


That got molded into a loaf (with the overflow in a pie tin because we wanted to compare textures).






I'll be honest, I liked last year's nut loaf better, but this made for a lovely veggie loaf.

After eating leftovers for 3 days, I wanted something different.

So, I had some really (REALLY) tart cranberry sauce that my daughter made. I added a bit of coconut palm sugar and some frozen pineapple and it made a delicious sweetly tart sauce to douse the loaf with. Yum.

I also melted American cheese on some leftover loaf for lunch. Clearly it made a lot!



Then there was leftover dessert.

This really had nothing to do with Thanksgiving. I was in a big fancy store )that shall remain nameless) and they were selling containers of snickerdoodles. After many days of pie, the cookies appealed to me.

Blah.

They had no flavor. It really tasted like someone had put plain sugar cookies in the snickerdoodle box.

So, I took some of the pecans left over from the yams and I mixed them with the coconut palm sugar and placed the lovely mix on my cookies and baked for a few minutes. Much better.

Plain cookies
sugar and pecans
All better!



13 comments:

  1. MMM, it ALL looks delicious! I love mushrooms and veggie loaf, but it has to be home made. I had some from once and it was awful.
    Those cookies... I can almost smell them! And completely understand about the blah flavor of the storebought. My kids begged for some sugar cookies sprinkled with colored sugar, you know the kids shaped like trees, etc.

    Of course those containers are HUGE and I thought it would at last a week or so. Um, no. We had them for three weeks before I threw them out. Nothing like home made. :)

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    1. Oh, UGH. Those cookies always look so pretty but taste awful!

      Absolutely agree on the homemade part, Virginia. I don't really trust mushrooms in pre-made stuff.

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  2. Wait -- no link to a recipe? Or did you just wing the amounts? Or am I still asleep and it's not registering? LOL

    Neat how you thought to doctor the store bought cookies. You are a creative cook the most I would have thought to do was douse them in melted chocolate. :-)

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    1. Not asleep. Kav. I didn't want to post a link to the recipe after I said I didn't like it as much as last year's. But I'll message you with it. It was good, just not AS good.

      Melted chocolate and then dipped in crushed nuts or peppermints. Sounds good to me!

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  3. And then you wonder how a commercial bakery can mess up something as simple and delicious as a Snickerdoodle... and the answer is cheap ingredients and over-baking.

    What an ingenious and fun way to doctor them, though! I've also learned to use bad finds like that to make cookie crumbs for cookie crusts. If you add vanilla or almond and butter and bake the crust, no one ever knows it was a boring, bland snickerdoodle, unworthy of that centurion name!!!

    We did a wonderful Turkey a la King for Sunday dinner, which I'm posting for tomorrow, but my card for my camera died, the little memory card? So the pictures are on the card but unretrievable....

    It was so easy and delicious and even the little Jamison boys loved it! I'd never thought to make it before, so this was a total win.

    Veggie loaf: I'm kind of in awe of veggie loaf.

    :)

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    1. Veggie loaf is fun - sort of like meatloaf but you feel insanely virtuous when you're indulging!

      Sorry about the photos. :(

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  4. While I might try a veggie loaf, Mary Cate, it would definitely not fly with my guys. Love what you did with the cookies, though. Don't you hate it when you buy something and it doesn't live up,to your expectations? I like Ruthy's idea about using them for crust, too.

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    1. Definitely did not fly with my husband or eldest daughter either, Mindy. But that's okay - more leftovers for me!

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  5. The veggie loaf looks delicious! I have a recipe for something called "savory rice loaf," basically rice cooked, then molded into a loaf with seasonings added, and then baked. It's a ho hum kind of dish, but what if I added veggies to it? I have a sudden hankering to pull that recipe out again!

    And I'm laughing about the snickerdoodles! I learned the same lesson Mary Jane/Virginia did - the cheap cookies just aren't worth the price. I'm glad you found a way to redeem them!

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  6. Jan, that's pretty basically the same. It had brown rice and lentils as a base and then all the other stuff added in. One really nice addition - when I was having lunch today I found a few cranberries in my loaf. Must have fallen in somehow, but they gave it a really nice tang so I might reinvent this as a veggie/dried fruit loaf.

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  7. Mary, I think I would love that veggie loaf! I'll give it a try sometime and let you know. :)

    Love how creative you got on the cookies!

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    1. I think I can wing the veggie amounts. But did this one have eggs binding it?

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    2. No eggs, Missy since the vegan made it. I'll email you a link to the recipe.

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