It’s 9 p.m. The dishes are done. The kids are eying the extra pie, calling dibs on it for breakfast. The dog is looking longingly at the bones left on the table. And I’ve got about a metric ton of leftovers in the fridge and freezer.

What do you do with your Thanksgiving leftovers?

I think we all pretty much know what to do with what’s left of the turkey — use the carcass for soup, make a congee (a thin rice porridge), chop the meat into salad or stews, etc. (and if you need more inspiration, you can adapt some ideas from these suggestions for what to do with leftover roast chicken). Pies and Cakes equal breakfast the next day. But what about the rest of those Thanksgiving leftovers? The green beans? The mashed potatoes? The stuffing?

The internet is vast, so you can find the recipes that suit your family best. But here are a few great ideas:
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When it comes to big holidays, most people could use a survival guide—not for getting through the big day itself, necessarily, but for dealing with all of the hoopla that goes along with it.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday (Friends! Family! Nothing to wrap and give except leftovers!), but if you work a paid job in addition to (unpaid) parenthood, that annual Thursday holiday can really do a number on your sanity.

What’s a working mom to do? Here, let me be your Thanksgiving sherpa:
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There are times when you’re juggling work and parenthood and housework and home work and you drop the ball. Or a few balls, or– as happened with me last week–pretty much all the balls.

Usually, I know that if work is taking up a lot of my time on any given day, I can tilt the scales in the other direction and pick up the parental slack. But other times, the dropped balls seem so… numerous. And I feel so… singular. And I need more motivation in order to start juggling it all again.

Here’s what I do:
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Back in the day—that is, long before he and I were together—my husband was a vegetarian. So much so that when his first child was born, back in the early 1990s, he fed her soy butter and “not dogs” and lots of tofu.

By the time his youngest child was born, though, in the mid-2000s, he was letting the baby lick steak off of a fork at the dinner table. So when the kind folks at Tribe Hummus and Veggie Patch offered to let my family try a bunch of vegetarian goodies in honor of October being vegetarian awareness month, I thought that perhaps those long-dormant vegetarian tendencies might surface again.
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