Still enjoying Christmas leftovers?

If they’ve been in the refrigerator since Christmas, it may be time to toss them.

Holidays typically bring an over abundance of food.  This year, I hosted my first Christmas dinner.  It was a small crowd – just six of us.  But we all like different things and I wanted everyone to enjoy their holiday meal.  We had a roasted turkey, half a ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potato casserole, green beans, whole berry cranberry sauce, and two types of rolls.  For dessert, I served both apple and pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream.

As you can imagine, there were plenty of leftovers.  Leftovers are great – but they need to be properly handled to prevent food borne illnesses.  Immediately after dinner, I went right back to work getting the leftovers quickly in the fridge and freezer.  Food should not stay in the danger zone (40-140 degrees) for more than 2 hours.  Our holiday family dinners easily stretch on for an hour so by the time the meal is over, my top priority is putting away the leftovers.  Dishes can wait; food staying at unsafe temperatures cannot.

I had planned in advance the next couple days of lunches and dinners.  I made sure everyone was happy with what I’d planned.  The enthusiastic response was nice when I suggested we eat leftovers on the 26^th because it’d be an easy meal before we headed out to watch a hockey game.  Having a plan helped determine how much food to freeze.  We now have several freezer bags full of delicious ham and turkey.  The rest of the food was mostly finished within two days.  By Sunday night, if there were leftovers that hadn’t been eaten, they were frozen or tossed.

How do you know how long leftovers are safe to eat?  Stilltasty.com is a fabulous resource.  You can enter a specific food or beverage and find out the best way to store it and how long it will stay safe and tasty.  The site uses trustworthy sources for its information.

And even though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on food safety, I learned this holiday that I should’ve refrigerated my apple pie when it wasn’t eaten in a couple of days.  Unfortunately, the last slice ended up in the garbage.  If only I had checked “apple pie” on stilltasty.com earlier.