Thanksgiving leftovers: what to make all week
Canadian Thanksgiving falls on Monday 12 October 2026, and the US holiday follows in November — but the fridge problem is the same either way: a lot of turkey, a bowl of mashed potatoes, bread nobody ate, and sides in three different containers. Here's the order to use them in, and real recipes for each.
Start with the turkey, because it's the biggest volume and the shortest-lived. Then the potatoes, which fry and bake better cold than they reheat. Bread and stuffing become savoury bakes, and the leftover vegetables disappear happily into a soup or a frittata.
A simple order to work through
- The night of dinner
- Get the meat off the carcass before it goes in the fridge, and store it in shallow covered containers rather than one deep tub. Keep the potatoes, bread and vegetables in separate containers so you can build different meals rather than reheating the same plate.
- Day one: the easy meals
- A melt, a wrap or a hash. These use small amounts and need almost no cooking, which is exactly what anyone wants the day after a big meal.
- Day two: the big-volume meals
- Soup, chilli or a pot pie. This is where the bulk of the turkey goes, and where stock made from the carcass earns its keep.
- Anything still left
- Freeze it in portions, flat in bags, rather than pushing it to the back of the fridge. Frozen shredded turkey with a spoonful of its own juices thaws in minutes.
The turkey
Deal with this first — it's the leftover with the shortest useful life and the biggest volume. Soup and a bake use the most meat at once.
Mashed and roast potatoes
Cold cooked potato behaves completely differently from raw: it fries, it binds, it crisps. These are dinners rather than reheated side dishes.
Bread rolls and stuffing-style bakes
Stale bread and leftover stuffing want the same treatment: soak them in something savoury or sweet and bake. Nothing here needs fresh bread.
The sides nobody finished
Cooked vegetables lose their looks long before they lose their flavour, so put them where texture comes from something else — a soup, a bake, a frittata.
Guides for each leftover
Each of these covers storage, reheating and what to make, ingredient by ingredient.
Don't throw dinner away.
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