I’m all for avoiding food waste – but you’ve got to draw the line at some creative post-Christmas recipes
Recipes that make more than usually creative use of Christmas leftovers always seem to me to have a faintly comic air, as if they’d been written not by some plucky and determined food stylist for the website of a major TV chef – “These turkey and honey-glazed ham enchiladas are so much easier to make than you think!” – but by Carla Lane or Mike Leigh at the back end of the 70s. Yes, bubble and squeak is a fine thing, especially with a fried egg; I will brave almost any amount of Boxing Day traffic for a mean variation on shepherd’s pie. But once you get into the realms of full bastardisation – a parsnip “dhal” that tastes faintly of bread sauce – it all starts to get a bit creepy. The prospect of “creamy goose curry” is not, for me, an enticing one – with or without homemade chutney. Like some medieval pilgrim, warily anticipating yet another heinous rip-off en route to Canterbury, I worry about the condition of a bird whose owner has resorted to camouflage in the form of cumin, cloves and garlic.
Does this sound fussy? Having once attended a Christmas buffet whose centrepiece comprised a bowl of “hummus” made from boiled carrots that came with light top notes of gravy – looking back, it seems miraculous that we were not invited to dip pickled onions into this festive outrage – I prefer to think of it as merely sensible: forewarned is forearmed, and all that (the period between Christmas and New Year, when everyone is absolutely sick both of cooking and of the contents of their fridge is to my mind the perfect time for zingy Thai takeaways).
Related: The Christmas turkey: is it ever worth the bother?
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