Here are a few more creative ways to use your Thanksgiving leftovers and get the most for your money. Instead of letting leftovers go to waste, you can easily reuse them to create fresh meals:

• Left Over Potato Pancakes
• Eggs Over Stuffing
• Thanksgiving-Leftovers Shepherd’s Pie
• Homemade Turkey and Left Overs Noodle Soup

For instance, if you have leftover mashed potatoes, you can turn them into savory Left Over Potato Pancakes. 

Simply combine 2 cups of mashed potatoes, 2 eggs, a little flour, and garlic powder. Fry up rounds of the mixture in a skillet for about 10 minutes and serve with smoked salmon, eggs, or bacon. With a little bit of effort, you’ll have a delicious new dish for the next day or two.

If you have leftover stuffing, you can make a low-cost meal called “Eggs Over Stuffing.”

Just pack a layer of stuffing into a well-greased baking dish. Make two indentations crack an egg in each, and top with a little cheese. Pop it in the oven for 10-15 minutes and you’ll have a quick-and-easy breakfast option.

Then, there’s one of my favorites, Thanksgiving-Leftovers Shepherd’s Pie. This recipe, from Martha Stewart, throws in everything but the pumpkin pie. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a slice or two of that left to enjoy with the last squirt of whipped cream.

• 3 cups cooked stuffing
• 1 cup cranberry sauce, plus more for topping (optional)
• 1 pound sliced cooked roast turkey with sage
• 10 ounces glazed carrots (or another leftover vegetable)
• 4 to 6 tablespoons gravy
• 3 to 4 cups mashed potatoes

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. On a 9- to 10-inch pie plate, mound stuffing on the bottom, then layer with cranberry sauce, turkey and carrots. Drizzle with gravy and spread potatoes over the surface to the sides of the dish. Top with more cranberry sauce, if desired.

Place pie on a baking sheet and bake until heated through and potatoes are golden, 35 to 40 minutes. Let cool slightly.

Last, but not least, you can use your leftovers to make the most delicious Homemade Turkey and Left Overs Noodle Soup. This recipe is from Penny Kazmier, a wife and mother, who took her inspiration from an unlikely source — the Food Network show “Iron Chef America.” She writes:

We chopped celery and carrots from a relish tray and added some fresh onion to create the perfect base for our soup. We cut turkey, both white and dark meat, into bite-sized pieces. We started by sautéing the vegetables in one pot and heating chicken stock in another. To the stock we added leftover gravy, stuffing and green bean casserole. Wet bread and green bean casserole might sound disgusting, but think about it … cooks use bread as a thickener for sauces and a binder in meatballs. The starches served as a good thickener for our soup. On top of this, it added sage and other spices to the stock. Once the stock heated through we used an immersion blender to carefully purée the entire mixture.

Next we added the turkey and stock to the vegetables and added a little water to thin the soup a bit before bringing the mixture to a boil and adding the finishing touch, homemade noodles. The result was a silky smooth thick soup full of Thanksgiving goodness and chewy thick noodles; pure comfort food that tasted so good even we were surprised.

Should you decide to create your own version of our soup, don’t feel like you need to follow this recipe exactly; let it serve as a guideline and use the leftovers you have on hand. Just make sure you have a balance and not too much of any one ingredient.

I know the recipe sounds odd, but I cannot begin to tell you how proud we were of our delicious “Iron Chef”-inspired soup. Before we knew it the rest of the family was sitting around the table with bowls of hot soup telling us how good it was, blissfully unaware that they were eating leftovers — again.

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