Christmas food leftovers can be a dilemma sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be. I think you are provided with chance to create to new and interesting meals. If you store your Christmas leftovers in airtight containers after the Christmas meal you can have 3-4 days worth of ingredients available to make some great meals.

My Christmas lunch included four roast meats – roast lamb, roast chicken with apricot stuffing, roast ham with cranberry glaze and roast pork with crackling. There were also roasted potato, carrot and pumpkin and lots of greens – green beans, broccoli and brussel sprouts. There was plenty for everyone. And yes, there was plenty of Christmas food leftovers.

And what to do with Christmas food leftovers? Well, here are some of the things I made with my leftover food.

Christmas Food Leftovers

1. Re-heat the food for Christmas Dinner

The first meal I made with my Christmas food leftovers was simply to re-heat some of the food and serve it for dinner. The second time around was pretty good, but I don’t think I could eat it for a third time!

re-heated Christmas leftovers

2. Make Meals with the Meats

I had four meats in my Christmas Day lunch – ham with cranberry glaze, roast lamb, roast chicken with apricot stuffing and roast pork with crackling. Here’s some meals I made with these meats.

Ham

One of the best things I find to do with ham is to make Ham and Cheese Toasties. I slice the ham as thinly as I can and I add two slices of cheese as I love my toasties cheesy. A piece of cheese on either side of the ham between the bread. Just yum!

ham and cheese toasties

The other meal I made with the leftover ham was a Pea and Ham Soup. So easy to make. Chop the ham and in a pot, put the ham, a handful of frozen peas (you can use dried split peas). You can chop some carrot and celery and add to pot. Then a bay leaf (if you have) and some vegetable stock. Boil and when everything is soft – serve. If your pea and ham soup is looking a little watery, don’t worry, just keep cooking and stirring and you will get your desired texture. If you can’t wait, you can add a little cornflour to help it thicken.

Pea and ham soup – great to make with leftover Christmas ham

Lamb

With the leftover roast lamb from my Christmas lunch I made a yummy Lamb Curry. As I didn’t have regular rice in my pantry, but Aborio risotto rice, I turned the lamb curry into a Lamb Risotto Curry. I chopped a brown onion and in a pan heated some oil and threw in the onion and added some curry powder. Keen’s Curry Powder in this case. I let these cook a little to bring out the flavours. To make the curry a risotto, I added the rice now. Then I added my chopped lamb, a handful of frozen veggies, stir and cook for a few minutes. Add a cup or two of water now and let everything cook. Once ingredients are soft, I add some coconut milk with a teaspoon of flour to thicken the sauce. If I don’t have coconut milk I add regular milk. Then serve.

Chicken

I didn’t have much chicken leftover from our Christmas lunch but the little I had I made a chicken sandwich. If I had more chicken I probably would have made a curry with it, similar to the lamb curry I made.

Pork

With the leftover pork I made some pork sliders, which went down very well I might add. Pork sliders are so easy to make. You put it together similar to a homemade hamburger. You have smaller hamburger buns that you pile ingredients between the top and bottom of the bun. I turned our leftover pork into pulled pork by using a fork to shred it. Along with the pork we added a coleslaw and BBQ – yum!

pork sliders are a great way to use up leftover pork

3. Use up the Seafood

Seafood needs to be used up very quickly after any Christmas meal as it doesn’t keep fresh as long as other Christmas dishes. Surprisingly after our Christmas lunch we had some leftover prawns so I turned them into prawn fritters. I made an easy batter of flour and milk, added the prawns and turned them into a mixture. I did sneak in some veggies such as corn and peas. And the kids didn’t notice! After heating oil in a frypan I put large spoonfuls of the prawn batter mix into the oil and voila, yummy prawn fritters that I served with a chilli sauce to dip the fritters in.

prawn fritters with hidden vegetables

4. Cook up the leftover Veggies

What to do with the leftover veggies? With the leftover baked pumpkin I made pumpkin soup. I squished the pumpkin to a paste added some chicken stock, though adding water is fine, then heated it in a saucepan and served.

The other dish I made with the leftover vegetables was Bubble and Squeak. My mum use to make this a lot to use up the leftover vegetables from dinner the night before. Basically, my mum would cut the veggies into small pieces before lightly frying them and serving them. Depending on the vegetables she would often serve them on toast.

How will you use your Christmas leftovers?

I hope I’ve given you lots of ideas to use up your Christmas food leftovers. I’d love to hear what you did with yours to give me inspiration for next Christmas.