I cooked a huge meal for Christmas lunch, knowing that I would be able to stretch it for several more days. The day after Christmas we shared left-overs with our friends and ended up with about 1/4 of a spiral ham and even more unexpected was the left-over BBQ pork from my family gathering. So far, I would consider our use of left overs a success! We been eating up the left-overs for 7 days now but I have been able to use things in different ways and actually freeze several easy to prepare meals to use in the next couple of months.

The first creative left-over was ham bone soup. I cut most of the remaining ham off the bone and threw the bone in crockpot with an additional 2 cups of chopped ham, added a bag of navy beans, chopped up cooked carrots, a couple of stalks of celery that were not used, 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, 1 teaspoon of pepper, 1 teaspoon of salt and 6 cups of turkey stock. We ate this for a dinner meal and I froze a container to use as a quick soup meal.

I pulled out my food processor to make ham salad. This is an awesome snack or lunch.

Yesterday, I chopped up some of the ham and mixed with remaining mac and cheese. Kendall, who is not a left-over person loved this and requested that I make it again! Today at lunch, we finished up the ham by making ham and cheese quesadillas.

Left-over BBQ was eaten as several meals of sandwiches, next I made two containers of Pork Fried Rice. We ate one for dinner and finished as a lunch. The second container was frozen again for a easy meal in the future.

Turkey is an easy sandwich of course. But I have also made a pot of Turkey taco soup, simply chop up the cooked turkey instead of ground beef. This also made two meals with one in the freezer to use later on.

Can you share a creative left-over that I have not thought of?