After the big meal, I want dinners that feel new, not "round two." This roundup is a mix of comfort and reset: soups with lift, crisp salads, stacked sandwiches, baked pastas, and a few total flavor pivots like curry, ramen, and taco night. I kept it practical - most recipes use pantry staples, welcome a handful of vegetables, and reheat well for lunches.
Every Thanksgiving, former Poltergeist chef Diego Argoti serves free bowls of noodle soup to anyone in need of a warm meal on the holiday. While the menu occasionally rotates, it always involves a Thanksgiving-inspired bowl of ramen. Here, Argoti shares his modified recipe for home cooking, making use of not only your leftover turkey carcass but also any surplus sides.
Our favorite way to use up extra deli meat is to make a rich and creamy chicken cordon bleu soup. While this recipe typically calls for raw chicken and ham that you need to cook, you already have both on hand, pre-cooked. This means it will be even faster and easier to make a flavorful soup. Along with your extra deli chicken and ham, you'll also need chicken stock, onion, cream cheese, heavy cream, and cheddar cheese.
All it takes is some shredded chicken, a quick cream sauce made from a good can of condensed soup (like Campbell's Cream of Chicken) plus a bit of sour cream, and of course, poppy seeds, and you've got a comforting classic that can bring everyone to the table, then send them off satisfied. But rather than making it from scratch, if you've got a rotisserie chicken leftover from the other night's dinner, the good news is you can have
James Beard had answers for that all the way back in 1949, when he published The Fireside Cook Book, which reads like a modern manual. It teaches two habits that still work now: buy well, use it all, and plan ahead. Beard framed thrift as quality, and his line advising to use "the best ingredients available and waste nothing" is a timeless system for great flavor and few scraps.
Just husk the corn, remove the silk and grill those cobs naked so they're lightly charred, sweet, slightly crisp with a roasty popcorn taste. While you can't beat a thick smear of butter, a sprinkle of coarse salt and pepper, I love anointing the cobs with a tangy-hot Mexican sauce and a dusting of salty cheese. The tangy-hot combination is remarkably simple. Just whisk together good mayonnaise, lime juice, chili powder, salt and pepper. It amplifies the corn's grilled flavor and balances its sweetness.