I love a good Thanksgiving dinner but I think I love Thanksgiving leftovers just as much. A rerun of dinner is great, but sometimes you want to change things up a little. These websites can help you find creative and delicious recipes to use up everything from the turkey carcass to the mashed potatoes.
Taste of Home provides readers with recipes by course, cooking style, cuisine, ingredient, holiday and more categories to find a new family-favorite recipe. It’s got great tips and tricks for both beginner and seasoned cooks, a whole page dedicated to Thanksgiving, and useful articles like How Long Are Thanksgiving Leftovers Good For? particularly helpful this time of year.
You’ve probably seen some of Yummly’s recipe videos on social media sites like Facebook or Snapchat. Their videos are creative, easy to follow and precise. It has a database of over two million recipes – including over 1300 recipes for Thanksgiving leftovers – using both practical and more unusual ingredients, is easy to use and is equipped with search options that allow you to match your search to your dietary needs. When you create a free account, you can save recipes, make shopping lists, and share your recipes with others. You can even create meal plans based on your dietary restrictions and allergies.
I still have the 1960’s era Betty Crocker cookbook my mother handed down to me when I got married. Though some of the recipes from the ’60s and ’70s haven’t aged well – seriously, why was everything set in Jell-O? – the good people at Betty Crocker have updated (and eliminated some) recipes – think less food-based-on-a-dare and more delicious-healthy-meals-for-your-family, so their website is a great resource for Tips for Using Your Thanksgiving Leftovers or creating delicious new meals from your Thanksgiving leftovers.
You’ve probably seen Tasty’s videos on your Facebook feed or in a Buzzfeed article. Step by step videos show users how to create delicious dishes with ingredients you probably already have on hand, including those Thanksgiving leftovers. With categories like Back to School, Weekend Meall Prep, Healthy Eating, and Keto, there’s years worth of recipes and meal plans waiting for you to experiment with.
Allrecipes is the largest food-focused social network created for cooks by cooks. The site is user-curated with all recipes – hence the name – shared with the intent of making us all better cooks. Users are encouraged to post recipes they’ve tried, include photos, reviews of the recipe itself, and any tips or tweaks you tried.
Food Network offers up countless recipes including loads of options for leftover turkey as well as a list of their Best Thanksgiving Leftover Recipes and Top Thanksgiving Leftovers recipes with quick and easy recipes for soup, turkey pot pie, sandwiches, and more tested in the Food Network kitchens.
Tracey Dowdy is a freelance writer based just outside Washington DC. After years working for non-profits and charities, she now freelances, edits and researches on subjects ranging from family and education to history and trends in technology. Follow Tracey on Twitter.
The How to Cook Everything app is based on the book How to Cook Everything® from New York Times columnist Mark Bittman. With 2,000 recipes and 400 how-to illustrations, Bittman walks you through meal planning and execution step by step. Use the app on or offline, bookmark your favorite recipes, add your own, watch or read tutorials, plus the app’s integration with Facebook and Twitter makes it easy to share recipes with others. One unique feature is the constant-on button so your screen won’t dim while you’re busy with prep.
Yummly is arguably one of the most comprehensive foodie apps available. Instead of drawing from their own database, Yummly aggregates recipes from all your favorite sites and blogs – Food Network, Allrecipes, Chow, Steamy Kitchen – filtered by search criteria as diverse as cook time, allergies, cuisine or holiday. You can customize your search to foods you like or eliminate recipes that include foods you don’t like, create a grocery list, and in select cities, have those groceries to your door in an hour. A recent update allows users to sync the nutrition and serving information with your iOS Health App.
The Food Network app allows you to make recipes from all your favorite Food Network stars with thousands of recipes, how-to videos, grocery lists, and menus, all at your fingertips. Search for recipes by chef or by ingredients, add notes, recipe tweaks or substitutions and link with your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest accounts, or share recipes via email.
Perfect for summer patio season, the Weber® Grills app offers over 250 recipes from main courses to dessert. Each recipe has full color photos, comes with a shopping list, step by step directions and includes a timer so your burger or S’more’s are perfect every time. You can even set multiple timers so the steaks don’t overcook while you wait for the vegetables.
The Epicurious app is described with words like “polished” and “robust,” so you know where this is going. Maybe not the best app for the beginner cook but definitely a great option for anyone with a little experience and a willingness to expand your skill set and palate. There are over 35,000 recipes for appetizers through desserts, menus for everything from “Passover Mains” to Spring brunches, shopping lists, beautiful photos, and a built-in timer. Simply choose from one of the 40+ ingredients and the custom timer will tell you how long to cook it by factoring in weight and cooking method. You’ll even get a reminder if it’s time to flip that burger!