We’ve just about polished off all the leftovers from Thanksgiving this year. I tried to keep them to a minimum by not cooking the things most people in my family don’t eat (stuffing, gravy) and cooking moderate portions of everything else. We had just the right amount of mashed potatoes and only one serving left of the salad, curried butternut squash soup and apricot-glazed beets.

Tonight we’ll finish the last of the turkey soup. I made the broth with the carcass and cut up the last bits of meat, along with some carrots.

I had more than a cup of cranberry sauce leftover, so I mixed it with a couple of diced apples and poured it into a frozen pie crust. I made a crumbly topping with oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon, spread it over the pie and baked it for about 35 minutes at 350 F.

Share your own leftover ideas in this thread. In the past I’ve used mashed potatoes to make potato pancakes, which was tasty.

Thanks to Griffieon Family Farms for the fabulous heritage turkey, the Huber Family Farm for Charlotte potatoes, which won raves, and One Step at a Time Gardens for the squash, onions, garlic, carrots, and beets.

UPDATE: I forgot that I have most of a jar of applesauce left, and no one in my family likes to eat it plain. Anyone have any good cake or quickbread recipes that use a lot of applesauce?

Happy Thanksgiving to the Bleeding Heartland community!

Some holiday-related links are after the jump, along with a bonus action alert and a couple of recipes for Thanksgiving leftovers.

By now you have probably heard that a crowd of people desperate to get into a Long Island Wal-Mart at 5 am on Friday trampeled a worker to death:

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

“They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

“They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,” Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

I have nothing profound to say about this tragedy. It is a disgrace to our country that buying things has become such an obsession during the holiday season that a crowd of people will step on someone to get in on a “Black Friday” sale at the crack of dawn, and even step on the people trying to help him.

Clearly stores are going to have to stop offering special deals on the day after Thanksgiving that are only good for the first X number of customers, or only good until a certain early hour of the morning. Doing away with first-come, first-served “general admission” seating at rock concerts prevented a recurrence of the stampede that killed 11 people trying to see The Who in Cincinnati in 1979.

I wonder if the media will reduce the hype about post-Thanksgiving shopping next year as well.

What are you thankful for today?

What do you like and dislike about this holiday?

What are you eating for dinner today?

Meteor Blades posts this diary every year: How I Learned to Savor Thanksgiving

Normally, I like to “celebrate” Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving, because I loathe the shopping frenzy and the media hype that goes along with it. However, this year I’ll be buying Chanukah presents for my kids while they’re at home with Mr. desmoinesdem.

UPDATE: Todd Beeton is thankful for Sarah Palin, “for driving my never voted for a Democrat in her life Mom to cast her ballot for Barack Obama this year.”