The holiday season is upon us! Over the next few months, we will be guests at any number of culinary extravaganzas. We will consume more calories in a single night than a reasonable person can burn in a month-long free trial at the gym. But the fun doesn’t stop there. There might be leftovers.
Consider these nontraditional ways to handle leftovers:
• Host a STEM event at a local school. Leftover Halloween candy works best for this option. Simply gather up all the candy bars left behind by the trick-or-treaters who never came, portion out the extra candy corn into bowls, and challenge teams to construct a working machine or a solid structure without nibbling on a single piece of candy. Award prizes of Halloween candy based on function, form and fun. The biggest STEM challenge of this event is to calculate the correct number of prizes so that there is no candy left over at the end.
• Hold a pie-eating contest. Any leftover pies from your feast can be cut into individual slices and recycled into a sporting event. All you need is a timer, some bibs, and a group of people who will rise to the challenge even if they are full to bursting from the original dinner. Don’t be stingy with the antacids.
• Assert your dominance. You’re the host — you get to decide what happens to your leftovers. It’s a time-honored tradition to press leftovers on your dinner guests on their way out the door. Mellowed by good food and drink, they are defenseless when the plastic containers come out. Don’t pause to consider that the fact that there are leftovers in the first place might indicate that your guests did not care for your food. Make sure they go home with enough for another meal followed by another round of leftovers. And so, it continues…
• Post on social media. This option requires total commitment on your part to be successful. You must completely document your food journey, from preparation, to the beautifully set and fully laden table, to the individual plates overflowing with food, to the ravaged table at the end of the meal, and finally to the heaps of leftovers collecting on the sideboard. While you’re taking all these posed photos, be sure to avoid anything in the background, like that pile of unpaid bills on the counter or the impish child sneaking food to the dog, that would detract from your carefully constructed narrative.
• Make soup. If you have a bit of broth, anything in your refrigerator can legitimately be called soup. On the day after Thanksgiving, do you have some dried-out turkey, garlic-stuffed olives, pickled radishes, cornbread stuffing, and half a jar of strained green beans that your baby refused to eat? Toss it all in the pot and call it Stew Surprise. Nobody’s hungry anyway.
• Conduct a science experiment. We’re all interested in the science behind the growth of mold on food, right? Take some of that dried-out turkey and set it up in different environments: the fridge, the freezer, the countertop, the shower, etc. Which one will grow mold the fastest? You can even set up a livestream and take bets from people on the internet who ate up all their own turkey and now have no way to test this out for themselves. You could go viral and make a lot of money. Who knows how many people have nothing better to do than sit around and watch you watching mold grow on your leftovers.
• Sell your leftovers on eBay. It’s worth a try, right? The secret to this method lies in the uniqueness of your description. Don’t call it, “leftover turkey and mashed potatoes.” Everybody’s got a bit of that in the days after Thanksgiving. Call it, “Exclusive morsel of succulent roasted turkey paired with whipped potatoes like your grandma used to make.” A photo of a kindly old woman wearing a ruffled apron and holding a beautifully packaged serving of leftovers should seal the deal.
If all else fails, you can heat up your leftovers in the microwave for an exact repeat of the meal from the day before. But where’s the fun in that?
• Peggy McKee Barnhill is a wife, mother, and author who writes cozy mysteries under the pen name “Greta McKennan.” She likes to look at the bright side of life.
