Honestly, I cannot take credit for this genius sandwich. It was sourced on a Silver Cloud sammich sissy and I shared a few weeks back, when our eager tummies sought a taste of the rapidly approaching thanksgiving holiday. Served on white bread with canned, jellied cranberries and Stove Top stuffing, it hit a nostalgic spot on the taste buds and got us both salivating for the feast to come.
When Sunday night following Thanksgiving rolled around and heating up yet another round of leftovers seemed, somehow, boring, I reached into the not-too-deep recesses of my food memory bank and found this sandwich waiting there. I wanted to copy that interesting, dumbed-down version with the fancy-ass delicious leftovers now crowding my fridge. So I checked our leftover stock to see if it could be possible: seedy whole-wheat bread, check; sage & mushroom ciabatta dressing, check; lots and lots of leftover cranberry-shallot glazed turkey, check. Yet, alas! We had no more cranberry sauce left!
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| Boiling away... |
A Thanksgiving dinner is nothing without that tiny dollop of tart cranberry sauce. We always had two in our family – my grandpa’s traditional cooked cranberry sauce, and the tarter orange-cranberry relish that is uncooked. To properly enjoy your turkey, you needed both. And to properly enjoy my leftover turkey sandwich, I needed at least one.
Lacking cranberries, I remembered K’s basic instructions on how to make a chutney – “you need fruit, spices, sugar, and vinegar.” Would dried cranberries suffice? I thought I could plump them up by cooking them with some acid and juice. I threw in a handful of raisins, too, to beef up the berreis’ relatively low number. A hearty squeeze of lemon juice stood in for the vinegar, and a tangelo (skinned, sectioned, and squeezed) complimented the tart berries with some sweet citrus, instead of sugar. Oh, and a Tablespoon or so of cranberry juice concentrate and apple jelly added intensity of flavor and a bit more substance, respectively.
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| The assembly line |
Boiled down until syrupy, this improvised cranberry orange compote really popped. It just fell in love with the turkey, but I can see this tarty mixture giving herself equally well to a pork tenderloin or perhaps even atop a nice creamy brie....
So on to the sandwich! First, I set four slices of grainy wheat breat to toast, so that they’d be sturdy enough to hold their husky fillings. I added a bit of stock to the stuffing to remoisten it, then after heating it up (microwave) I mashed it lightly with a fork – going for a more cohesive, spreadable texture here. I thinly sliced some white-meat turkey, and then set to assembly: bread, thin layer of mayo, stuffing, turkey, cranberry, bread. Some reheated green beans went alongside.
This is just a flipping awesome sandwich. Bright, tart fruit flavors on the sandwich are needed to cut through the relatively heavy layers of turkey and stuffing. This, dare I say, may have topped the “leftover turkey and plochmann’s mustard on grandma’s dinner roll 4 hours after dinner” as my all-time favorite leftover thanksgiving sandwich. But, you know, I’m not done with all those leftovers yet either…
Ultimate Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich
Grainy wheat bread, rye bread, or good old Wonderbread
Leftover Turkey, light and dark, sliced thinly
Leftover dressing, heated with a Tablespoon of water and mashed slightly
Orange-Cranberry Compote, or leftover cranberry sauce
Mayo
Toast the bread, then spread one side of one piece of bread with a little bit mayo, and the other piece generously with the cranberry sauce/compote. Top the mayo-side with stuffing, carefully spreading all the way to the edges, then layer turkey over the top. Top with cranberry piece. Feast. Repeat.
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