Step Away From the Fridge

I love celebrating the holidays. I love cooking even more. (Look forward to some tasty recipes coming your way for the rest of the month.)

What I don't like is feeling bloated and stuffed and generally tired from eating too much. Don't get me wrong, I love to eat. It's my favorite pastime right next to drinking. In some instances, I think I substitute food for love, but I'm not about to marry that blueberry pie I made. I do, however, seem to gain a disgustingly large amount of the L-Bs from Thanksgiving to New Year's.

It's hard to stay on top of exercising when the holidays throw you into a smorgasbord of delights from pies to stuffing to you name it. And with your family around, you'd rather be putting together puzzles and watching football than drag yourself outside in the cold for a jog. Then of course there are the leftovers. Don't deny it, you can't just throw all that good food away. So you store it in your little plastic boxes and bowls. Ziploc up that turkey leg you couldn't eat earlier. Also, didn't a parent once tell you that there are all those starving kids in Africa? Of course you'll feel horrible and feel like you have to finish the leftovers. Oh leftovers. It's not the scrumptious banquet that you had at Thanksgiving. It's the airtight containers of that same meal that are sitting in your fridge right now that are ruining your hard won waistline.

My attitude towards leftovers in the fridge is if it starts to smell funky, even the slightest, toss it. I'd say shelf-life is about one week to a week and a half (2 weeks - you're really pushing it)... But who knows? Maybe you found a really good way to preserve whatever the hell it is you have in the fridge. Freezing helps too.
But, you still have all this stuff in your fridge. It's like a ticking timebomb of possible gastrointestinal discomfort, and it's wasting your precious fridge space. So what do you do?
You eat with a fervor that is only seen in puppies. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you do something with those leftovers to make it more palatable, slowly whittling them down and regaining control over storage containers. Turkey pot pie, mashed potato croquettes, stuffing scrambled eggs. Until finally... finally... it's all spoiled or you're fed up or you finally ate everything.

This is generally the scenario I have. Though I'm pretty sure that by this weekend I will have disposed of the rest of the turkey pot pie because seriously, I need to poultry detox for the next holiday.

So eat away fellow foodies... but beware of those carbs you're heating up. They'll come back to bite you in the bum... literally.