The Special Dish To Use Up Thanksgiving Scraps

We all know that preparing Thanksgiving dinner eventually means leftovers. Even if you send your guests home with extra turkey and stuffing, the odds are you will still have more than enough for a couple of sandwiches left in your fridge when the night is over. Plus, what are you supposed to do with day-old green bean casserole? What if we told you there was a way to incorporate many of those leftovers into a brand-new dish the next day with minimal effort and just a skosh of forethought? May we present, for your dining pleasure, the turkey pot pie! 

Tasting Table recipe developer Michelle McGlinn concocted this recipe, which can use up a lot of the extra meat and veggies you have lying around after your Thanksgiving meal prep. You can even polish off any extra pie crust you have, if you made your own desserts this year. 

McGlinn's recipe calls for 1½ cups of broth or stock to add to your leftovers to help make the filling for the pot pie. Although any leftover chicken or turkey stock would work for this purpose, McGlinn notes that whipping up a vegetable stock made with the scraps from preparing Thanksgiving dinner works just as well if you remember to set them aside. 

McGlinn explains, "Vegetable stock is super easy to make, especially after a holiday like Thanksgiving when you're chopping onions, garlic, celery, and carrots galore." She advises cooks to "save the peels of the carrots, the ends of the celery, the skin of the onion, and the outside of the garlic," adding that "it's a great way to use those vegetable odds and ends for a new purpose and save on grocery costs!" And don't forget about the bird; adding any remaining turkey bones and drippings will only deepen the broth's flavor. 

This stock can then be combined with chunked leftover turkey and cold green bean casserole (sans the fried onions). The only additional groceries you'll still need are carrots, onions, and a can of mushroom soup — so don't worry about overbuying. Load all that Thanksgiving feast goodness into one pie crust and cover it with another, and all that's left to do is bake for a meal that tastes as good the second time as it did the first.