{"id":1750,"date":"2009-12-29T09:30:25","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T15:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/wordpress\/?p=1750"},"modified":"2013-08-21T21:27:27","modified_gmt":"2013-08-21T21:27:27","slug":"still-enjoying-christmas-leftovers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/d\/still-enjoying-christmas-leftovers\/","title":{"rendered":"Still enjoying Christmas leftovers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If they’ve been in the refrigerator since Christmas, it may be time to toss them.<\/p>\n

Holidays typically bring an over abundance of food.\u00a0 This year, I hosted my first Christmas dinner.\u00a0 It was a small crowd \u2013 just six of us.\u00a0 But we all like different things and I wanted everyone to enjoy their holiday meal.\u00a0 We had a roasted turkey, half a ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potato casserole, green beans, whole berry cranberry sauce,\u00a0and two types of\u00a0rolls.\u00a0 For dessert, I served both apple and pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, there were plenty of leftovers.\u00a0 Leftovers are great \u2013 but they need to be properly handled to prevent food borne illnesses.\u00a0 Immediately after dinner, I went right back to work getting the leftovers quickly in the fridge and freezer.\u00a0 Food should not stay in the danger zone (40-140 degrees) for more than 2 hours.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dishes can wait; food staying at unsafe temperatures cannot.<\/p>\n

I had planned in advance the next couple days of lunches and dinners.\u00a0 I made sure everyone was happy with what I\u2019d planned.\u00a0 The enthusiastic response was nice when I suggested we eat leftovers on the 26th<\/sup> because it\u2019d be an easy meal before we headed out to watch a hockey game.\u00a0 Having a plan helped determine how much food to freeze.\u00a0 We now have several freezer bags full of delicious ham and turkey.\u00a0 The rest of the food was mostly finished within two days.\u00a0 By Sunday night, if there were leftovers that hadn\u2019t been eaten, they were frozen or tossed.<\/p>\n

How do you know how long leftovers are safe to eat?\u00a0 Stilltasty.com<\/a> is a fabulous resource.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The site uses trustworthy sources for its information.<\/p>\n

And even though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on food safety, I learned this holiday that I should\u2019ve refrigerated my apple pie when it wasn\u2019t eaten in a couple of days.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the last slice ended up in the garbage.\u00a0 If only I had checked \u201capple pie\u201d on\u00a0stilltasty.com<\/a> earlier.<\/p>\n

\"apple<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If they’ve been in the refrigerator since Christmas, it may be time to toss them. Holidays typically bring an over abundance of food.\u00a0 This year, I hosted my first Christmas dinner.\u00a0 It was a small crowd \u2013 just six of us.\u00a0 But we all like different things and I wanted everyone to enjoy their holiday meal.\u00a0 We had a roasted Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":8576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,44,55],"tags":[1085,175],"class_list":["post-1750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-d","category-b","category-c","tag-b","tag-leftovers","cat-43-id","cat-44-id","cat-55-id"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/dishes-resized.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1750"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8575,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750\/revisions\/8575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nutritionknowhow.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}