Easter Leftovers

My gorgeous sister holding Easter court in her gorgeous dining room, 2022. 

Holiday meals at my sister's house yield ample leftovers to experiment with and our gathering for Easter last Sunday was no exception. We devour the plentiful appetizers, eat meager lunch plates, and then I fill up multiple Tupperware dishes of leftovers. Though there were 11 adults and five teenagers, I came home with ham and the ham hock, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, boiled eggs, most of the mascarpone torta appetizer I made, and most of the strawberry tartlets I made. We were all too stuffed from lunch to eat the three desserts that were there. 

My mom's recipe for Strawberry Devonshire Tart prepared as individual tartlets. 

I love turning leftovers into other dishes, stretching the work I did into another meal while stretching my culinary creativity muscles so we don't eat the same dish over and over. Like so many other people this week, I will make egg salad or deviled eggs from the Easter eggs my brother and I dyed. The ham will be fried up for breakfast, chopped and added to lentils, or ground for ham salad. I'll make red beans and rice with the ham hock. With guilt, I ate strawberry tartlets for breakfast.

Mashed potatoes are a great leftover to have. They can be the base for a creamy potato soup, layered into mashed potato bowls or shepherd's pie, formed into potato croquettes, or tonight for dinner, I used them for potato pancakes. The recipe is from the Travis-Williamson Counties Czech Heritage Cookbook (1996), which is chock full of traditional Texas-Czech recipes.  This dish is from the late Dorothy Bohac, a woman with a strong personality who got things done. I knew her from the early 1990s as the Travis-Williamson County Chapter of the Czech Heritage Society was forming. Her recipe starts with raw potatoes which she boiled and seasoned, but starting with leftover mashed potatoes makes dinner pull together so quickly. I would even recommend making extra mashed potatoes to be able to fry these the next day. 

But calling the little fried rounds "pancakes" is misleading. I'd call them "patties" since the softness of the potatoes doesn't allow for a pancake-sized round. (They'd fall apart.) I used a deep round tablespoon to scoop the seasoned mashed potatoes into a ball, then flattened the ball to a patty about 2 1/2" in diameter in my hand. Like all fried foods, the patties are best straight out of the oil, so use a large frying pan to fry as many as you can at once.  The recipe includes a variation, adding minced onion, garlic cloves, caraway seeds, and marjoram, which would all be tasty, either together or individually just to changed things up slightly every time you made these. 

Like with chicken nuggets, the sauce you dip the patties in is a matter of personal preference. My son and I ate them with "Truff Stuff" Truffle Aioli from Hopdoddy (an Austin-based hamburger restaurant.) If I'd had more time, I'd have made any number of Czech "gravies" from scratch to dip them in -- sauerkraut gravy, garlic gravy, tomato gravy, dill gravy -- which are commonly poured over boiled potatoes or served with pork. Potato patties make a great main for a meatless meal, too. I served them with my brother, Jason's (leftover) jalapeño creamed corn from Easter and the old standby of cucumber-tomato-red onion salad with a sour cream dressing. 

I fried more than we could eat, so now I have leftover leftovers for tomorrow morning. Waste not, want not. I'll rewarm them with a fried egg and ham on the side for my son's breakfast.