MONDAY MUSING: ZOOMING LEFTOVERS?

 Due to COVID-19 Thanksgiving 2020 couldn't be held like previous years. In fact, last year our home was fuller than usual as our kids had travelled from Atlanta, San Francisco and Madison to make Thanksgiving for us as Natureman had just had surgery a couple of weeks before.  The kids arrived with staples to make us a lovely Thanksgiving 2019. Natureman and I could just sit and enjoy our 2 year old granddaughter.

 BUT for Thanksgiving 2020 due to social distancing, tables all over our country were smaller with less bodies encircling them. The table was still set and traditional dishes were still made... We had to preserve some kind of normalcy, right?

It might have been a lot quieter at home in 2020 but many families congregated on Zoom to share their words of gratitude. We saw family members from Holland, Minnesota, different parts of California, Oregon, Ohio, D.C., Arkansas, Georgia and Massachusetts.  The conversation certainly matched the traditional bounty of food. And guess what? We survived.

Thanksgiving 2020 has come and gone without company to send food home with and a lot of us have been left with an abundance of Turkey Day leftovers.  Luckily, there are a lot of recipe ideas of how to incorporate those leftovers.  I don't know about you, but I actually tried some...

An entire stuffed turkey may not have been on our table but even a 5 lb Butterball breast with bones can have stuffing and provide a carcass to make a hearty tasty turkey soup. Add to that our garden swiss chard and sweet squash substituting for sweet potatoes. The additional twist was using leftover stuffing to make dumplings. Yes, they indeed do look like matzah balls!

 And then the following day some of the homemade cranberry sauce was blended with an equal amount of mayo to spread onto the turkey sandwich bread along with leftover stuffing adding another layer...

The taste of Thanksgiving all over again along with the memories of all those faces and conversations...

Those are definitely the best kind of leftovers...