leftover turkey dinner pucks

Paul and I always have a plan for Thanksgiving leftovers - turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwiches! For a week! LOL. I'm sure there are many of you out there that have similar plans for your leftovers, whether you celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving (in October) or American Thanksgiving (in November).

This year, we had another plan for our leftovers.

Paul and I attended the Toronto Underground Market back in September and one of the treats we tried was the awesome Thanksgiving Puck from Royal Tree Beaver. After blogging about how much we enjoyed them, Royal Tree Beaver tweeted us back and challenged us to create our own (especially timely since Thanksgiving was right around the corner).

So, after stuffing ourselves at two family dinners, we made sure to take home lots of leftovers to put together our own Leftover Turkey Dinner Pucks - turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce. 


I'm providing a recipe for our version of Leftover Turkey Dinner Pucks (which differs from Royal Tree Beaver's with the addition of turkey), but really, this is more of a general guideline than a recipe. The pucks can be adjusted based on the leftovers you have and your own preferences.

Our pucks came out AMAZING. They were crispy and full of flavour and were a really delicious way to use up leftovers. We can't wait until the next turkey dinner (at Christmas) to make these again. Actually, would it be weird if we celebrated American Thanksgiving too? 

leftover turkey dinner pucks
source: inspired by Royal Tree Beaver
printer-friendly version

ingredients:

vegetable oil
leftover turkey meat, shredded
leftover mashed potatoes
leftover stuffing
panko crumbs
salt
pepper
leftover gravy (optional)
leftover cranberry sauce (optional)

directions:

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together mashed potatoes, stuffing and shredded turkey. Add salt and pepper to taste. The mix should be approximately 40% mashed potatoes, 40% stuffing and 20% turkey. Feel free to experiment based on your tastes, but we found that the more turkey we put into the mix, the harder it was to get the puck to stay in one piece.

Take a generous portion of the potato-stuffing-turkey mix and pack it into a 3-inch wide ball. Once everything is nicely packed together, gently flatten the ball out into a puck shape, continually pressing in the sides and packing the ingredients together. This is a little tricky at first, but the more you make, the easier it gets. If you're having a lot of trouble, make the balls (and pucks) smaller. Also, keep in mind, the larger they are, the easier they fell apart (as Paul found out when he tried to make one that was the exact size of a real hockey puck).

Gently coat the puck in panko crumbs (I lightly pressed the crumbs into the puck as they weren't sticking easily on their own).

In a frying pan, heat about 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil on medium-high heat. Once the pan is hot, place the puck into the pan.

The amount of time you need to fry the puck will depend on how big and thick you made your pucks. Turn over at least twice. Basically, you want to heat your puck all the way through, plus you want to get a nice, crispy browning on both sides. Once your puck is heated through and you have crispy brown sides, remove from the pan.

Serve with re-heated gravy and cranberry sauce (both optional, but really, it's not a Thanksgiving meal without gravy and cranberry sauce!)