The day after Thanksgiving, aka, Black Friday, is also the best day for leftovers during the entire year. Not that I want to eat turkey, per se, but the wide variety of leftovers can be stunning, running the gamut from green bean hotdish to sweet potatoes to stuffing to tuna and pasta salad. Now I know that some folks don’t like leftovers, but the microwave and the refrigerator were invented to prolong the life of prepared uneaten food. There is an entire philosophy of economy in the ethos of leftovers that makes eating leftovers a noble cause. For example, some foods get better the second, third, or fourth day out: meatloaf, red sauce, stuffed red peppers, roast beef, paella, meatballs, marinated artichoke hearts. Most tater tot hotdish doesn’t really reach the apotheosis of its true flavor until its third day. Yet, lutefisk should not even be eaten fresh–why is that? A nice collection of little plastic cool whip containers that have been repurposed as leftover storage containers is a wonderful sight to see, lined up like little cold soldiers in the refrigerator, each containing a dab of something, slowly smoldering away a just above freezing, forgotten by all until someone decides to clean the refrigerator. Some people are leftovers hoarders, a strange twist in the OCD world where not even a dab of food might be thrown away. On any given day, if a leftover has not been eaten within a week of its creation, one might safely stop that experiment in the radioactive half life of Carbon 13. In my worldview of leftovers, one must make a concerted effort to consume leftovers in a timely fashion. Leftovers come into their own when they can be repurposed and turned into something else. A creative cook does more than just reheat and reserve. The great advantage of having leftovers the day after Thanksgiving is being able to haul out the repurposed cool whip containers and put on the same rich spread you had from the day before but with no work. I have refrained from discussing turkey because it is one of the foods which becomes suspect after a short while. Unlike a luscious piece of cold fried chicken, turkey becomes even blander than it was in the first place. Perhaps there is something sinister about leftover turkey which no one understands. A sandwich made of leftover turkey white meat is dry enough to choke a horse, that is, if horses ate turkey. Late night foraging into the darkly lit reaches of the average fridge is often successful is someone has been thoughtful enough to fill up the cool whip containers. There a few things sadder than the visage of one who has unsuccessfully rummaged in the fridge looking for that one last morsel of food just after midnight. Leftovers are the stuff that dreams, dark dreams that is, are made of: cranberries, peas, pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, black-eyed peas, rice, garbanzos. In the end, however, things that get left too long become biohazard experiments that eventually walk off under their own power.
