Leftovers Remade: Leftover Casserole

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.  Mine was about 700 times better than last year, so that's great!  I am still wearing my robe, drinking coffee and trying to wake up from all the excitement from the past couple days.

Did you have a big fancy Christmas dinner?  We had planned on it, but ended up just reheating some leftover soup!  But I know that lots of people have a repeat of Thanksgiving.  The good news is that I am about to start a 3-post special called Leftovers Remade!  After I hosted Thanksgiving, this is what my refrigerator looked like:

All that good for one person!  So I knew I had to do something fancy to use up lots of the leftover food.  I decided to host a Leftovers Remade party on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and invited lots of my family back to the house to eat more!  I made three different dishes using leftover things like turkey, gravy and mashed potatoes.  First up is the leftover casserole.

What's great about this casserole is that it's ridiculously easy, easily customizable based on what you happen to have left in our refrigerator, and yet it looks fancy and people are impressed.  Leftover stuffing forms a "crust" of sorts; it gets pressed down into the bottom of a baking dish.  Leftover veggies get put on top; I used brussels sprouts, carrots, peas and corn, but you could use green bean casserole, succotash, broccoli, whatever you have (I left out beets just because I didn't want everything turned red!).  Chopped turkey goes on top (but it would be easy to make this without meat!), followed by some gravy to keep things moist.  Mashed potatoes form the top crust, dotted with some butter if you're feeling decadent.  Bake until everything is bubbly and hot.

I'm happy to say that this casserole got everyone excited to eat the same things they had just eaten two days earlier.  That is pretty spectacular.  Plus it used up a lot of leftovers!  Most of the casserole got eaten, but I delivered the rest to my uncle Scott, who was obsessed with it.

I hope you have lots of leftovers in your fridge today, and that you need some ideas on how to recreate them into something your family wants to eat.  Stay tuned for more :)

Recipe:

leftover casserole
from Stepable
serves 6

Ingredients:
2 cups prepared stuffing
3 cups diced turkey
1 cup cooked vegetables
1 cup prepared turkey gravy
2 cups mashed potatoes
4 tablespoons butter

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Press the prepared stuffing into the bottom of a 9x13" baking dish.

2) Sprinkle vegetables on top of stuffing.  Add turkey, and pour on gravy.

3) Spread the mashed potatoes over the top, and dot with butter.

4) Bake until hot and bubbly, about 20 minutes, and serve.