Hello and good morning! I am coming to you super early this morning. I love the ability to time posts to fire off later than I write them. That way I can blog early in the morning and it doesn’t get posted until the rest of the world is awake. Technology…what will they think of next?!

Since I hosted Thanksgiving for the very first time this year, and hosted for roughly 30 people, I hugely overshot to the amount of food that I needed to feed everyone Oh well, live and learn. It is MUCH better to have too much food than not enough. But I was left with a scary amount of leftovers. I was determined to find a way to use everything up. So this week I will be doing a series of posts on creative ways to use up Thanksgiving or Holiday leftovers.

First up: Cranberry sauce. I didn’t have a lot of cranberry sauce leftover, maybe a couple of slices or so. So for breakfast yesterday I mixed the leftover cranberry sauce with about a cup of non-fat plain greek yogurt and stopped it with some pecans to add crunch.

It was pretty tart and a nice change of pace. I usually put in berries or honey so that the cranberry sauce added a different texture and a whole different flavor.

Of course I had coffee with it…two cups. A little love and peace on a Tuesday morning is never a bad things…

Lunch was leftover turkey soup that I made on Sunday. Turkey soup  is about the most common way to use leftovers. I can’t really take credit for this idea…

What started off like this…

Eventually became this…

Here is my soup recipe:

1. Place leftover turkey on a large stock pot. I used a drumstick and the wings as well as pieces of sliced up turkey. I wanted to make sure to use a lot of bones and skin because that is there the flavor for the broth.

2. Fill up the pot with water until the turkey is covered. I added some spices like sage, rosemary and parsley.

3. Bring to a boil, cover and boil for about 2 and a half hours. At this point your whole house will smell like amazing turkey soup!!!!

4. I made a turkey and rice soup. So I cooked the brown rice while the soup was boiling. You can certainly cook the rice in the broth of you prefer. I just did this to save time.

5. Place a pot in the sink with a strainer inside and strain the soup.

6. Pour the broth back into the initial pot and pick through the turkey ridding the meat of bones and skin. Place turkey back in the broth.

7. Add rice and leftover veggies to the pot. I added corn, peas, green beans and broccoli but you can really use whatever you have on hand. Since they were already cooked on Thanksgiving they just needed to be heated up.

8. Bring to a boil, let cool, serve.

I had a big bowl of soup for lunch. It came out really great considering it was my very first soup from scratch. I have made soup before using store bought broth but never made soup with my own broth.

After worked I headed to Crossfit. Work has been great and I LOVE my job, but the days are busy and it is nice to work everything out at the end of the day. The workout looked like this:

Each exercise is 30 seconds on/15 seconds rest (off)
5 Rounds at each station and then you are moving to the next station

1. Mountain climbers
2. KB Sumo Deadlift High pulls (12kg)
3. Burpees
4. Split squats (right leg) (12kg)
5. Gymnastics Push ups
6. Sit Stands
7. Triple Extension Jumps
8. Split squats (left leg) (12 kg)
9. Ab Mat Situps
10. 1-arm snatch left arm (8kg)
11. 1 arm snatch right arm (8kg)

At certain points I turned away from the clock so I couldn’t see how much time I had left in each round. The split squats really worked my quads and by the third round they were burning. I didn’t like the 1-arm snatches. For some reason it took a while for my brain to not want to clean and press the kettle bell, the movement was slightly counterintuitive.  I kept slapping the kettle bell off on my wrist at the top. It was a great workout per usual. Crossfit never fails to make me a sweaty mess. I cannot believe I have been a Crossfitter for over two years! Where does the time go?!

After the gym Adam and I started dinner. I had about 6 cups of leftover mashed potatoes. 6 CUPS!!!!! The great things about mashed potato leftovers is that they are easily made into gnocchi. Adam and I made our mashed potatoes into whole wheat gnocchi.

We mixed added 6 cups of mashed potatoes with 3 cups of whole wheat dough and 3 eggs in a large mixing bowl.

Then Adam kneaded it into a doughy constancy.

We took the dough and cut it into about 10 smaller sections and then rolled each section out into snake-like strands, about 1 inch thick.

Then we used a butter knife and cut the strands into 1 inch pieces of gnocchi. Six cups of mashed potatoes makes a lot of gnocchi, luckily this recipe freezes so well! I put individual servings into ziplock bags and we have about 6 more servings of gnocchi in the freezer right now.

I also whipped up a simple and tasty sauce while we were cutting up the gnocchi. The fantastic folks over at  Tuttorosso sent me some staples. I used the crushed tomatoes with basil and tomato sauce to start off the sauce.

The word “Tuttorosso” actually means “all red”. I love this brand because the products are all natural, affordable and the website is packed with a ton of healthy recipes.

Quick sauce:

• 1 tablespoon of EVOO
• A few cloves of minced garlic
• Tuttorosso crushed tomatoes with basil
• Turrorrosso tomato sauce
• 1 tablespoon of dried basil
• 1 tablespoon of dried oregano
• 1 tablespoon of dried parsley
• 2 tablespoons of sugar

Put all ingredients into a large sauce pan bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Easy…

Back to the gnocchi: I placed the gnocchi one by into a pot of boiling water and boiled them until the floated to the top. Then I strained them added sauce and dinner was served!!!!

The gnocchi came out awesome! This recipe is easily halved or quartered. Tip: This works well we leftover mashed potatoes, much better than fresh ones. So if you plan on making the potatoes just to create gnocchi make them the day before and left the sit in the fridge for a while.

Yesterday’s Outfit: 

Gray beaded collar blouse (Gap), Magenta cardigan (Old Navy), Black pants (Ann Taylor LOFT), Black patent leather round toe wedges (Nine West).

I will have two more creative and healthy Thanksgiving leftovers recipes coming up this week so stay tuned!

What is your favorite way to use Thanksgiving leftovers?  

Tags: Crossfit workouts, homemade turkey soup recipe, Recipes for Thanksgiving recipes, Tuttorpsso, Ways to use leftover cranberry sauce, ways to use leftover mashed potatoes, whole wheat gnocchi recipe