11 ideas for your Christmas roast leftovers

Christmas dinner is a time of plenty, and more often than not, leads to a heap of leftovers. You can make a Christmas roast last for plenty more meals for you and your family with a bit of creativity. There are, of course, the staples of cold turkey and salad (with leftover cheese from the cheeseboard) or gammon, egg, chips, but that can get boring.

In this article, I run through some more exciting recipes where you can use up your Christmas roast leftovers.

Let’s get to it.

Ideas for your Christmas dinner leftovers

Easy turkey and stuffing sandwich

Everyone has the perfect way to make a sandwich: mine involves fresh, warm bread from the local bakery, thickly (not always straightly) cut and loaded with leftover turkey, an air fried stuffing patty, and lashings of salad cream.

You can mould your stuffing to fit your slices or your roll, you can season your turkey with different kinds of spices to give it less of a Christmas flavour, add sauce, leftover veg (again, you can reheat or fry with spices to change the taste) or even cheeseboard cheese.

It’s up to you – your sandwich is your oyster.

Loaded baguette

Like the sandwich above, you can change the flavours and sauces to whatever you like. Simple and Homely’s Sydney prefers cajun or fajita seasoning on her loaded baguette, with a mix of leftover meats and cheeses. She isn’t above including leftover carrots and roasties or using cauliflower cheese as a dipping sauce.

I prefer mine more Sunday roast style.

Here’s a general method:

Shred down your turkey, gammon, beef or chicken (or a combination of all of them)
Choose your seasonings or make your sauce or gravy (remember: too wet and you’ll have soggy bread)
Toss them together
Prepare any vegetables you’re using, shape your stuffing (or leave crumbly, air fry, and add crunchy, similar to having crispy onions
Construct your baguette
Top with cheese, if using
Heat in the air fryer or under the grill until the cheese is golden

Leftover roast dinner pie

If you are good at making pastry, then by all means, don’t let us stop you. But, for me, it has to be shop bought.

Line your pie tin with pastry, ensuring there are no gaps or holes.

Layer in your leftovers in whatever combination tickles your pickle, and add a splattering of gravy or white sauce (particularly if you’re using poultry). Like with the sandwich, too wet and your pastry will have a soggy bottom. For a bit of adventure, you can coat your leftover meat in a curry marinade and go for a spicy pie instead.

Cover with a pastry top, brush with egg or milk, prick a few holes to allow the steam to escape, and bake for 20-30 minutes until the crust is golden brown.

If you’ve got leftover roasties or vegetables (and you haven’t already loaded them into your pie), serve them on the side.

Turkey fried rice

Turkey, gammon, or beef – doesn’t matter, if it’s leftover then it can go in. Shred a handful or two of meat, depending on how many people you’re feeding, and follow our egg fried rice recipe to make a great standalone meal or a nice side dish. You’ll also need rice, spring onions, and peas (you can always make a vegetable fried rice if you’ve got a bowl of cold veg staring at you every time you open your fridge).

Turkey chow mein

As above, you can use any meat or vegetables you’ve got leftover for this one. Head on over to our chow mein recipe to find out how to make it.

Cheats turkey tikka massala

A turkey curry on Boxing Day is a tradition at our house – a big pan filled with turkey tikka masala and a big pot of rice. Goes down a treat.

It’s an easy dish to make: whack some tikka masala curry paste into a pan of turkey pieces, and then just follow the instructions on your paste packet. Usually, you add the paste to the turkey, add tinned tomatoes, and then when it’s nearly ready to serve, take it off the heat and stir in double cream. Add it back to the heat to warm it through then serve.

Dish it up with rice, naan bread, or poppadoms.

If you’ve got leftover roast potatoes, you can create a potato side. Slice some roasties into halves or quarters, slowly fry some sliced onions in butter, add the potatoes and turn the heat to medium. Add a tablespoon of curry powder (drop in a knob of butter if it starts to stick to the pan) and fry for five minutes.

Roughly chop some fresh coriander and stir it through the potatoes when you’re ready to serve.

Turkey shepherd’s pie

Make a shepherd’s pie as you usually would, or check out our shepherd’s pie recipe for inspiration, and simply swap the mince for shredded turkey, or whichever meat you have leftover.

Slow cooked BBQ pulled turkey

It’s Christmas – you’ve just spent a whole day dedicating your time to cooking a roast. For a Boxing Day dinner, it’s more than ok to go store-bought for your sauce, and luckily, there are plenty of decent barbeque sauces to choose from. I prefer a sweeter sauce while Sydney thinks the “smokier the better”.

This is an incredibly easy recipe. Boxing morning, chop some onions (and peppers if you have any), shred your leftover meat, and whack both in your slow cooker. Cover it all with BBQ sauce and slow cook on low for three to four hours, or until you’re ready to serve.

This goes great in any leftover rolls you might have. A warm pitta would work even better.

On the side, you can repurpose leftover roasties as thick cut chips. Cut your roasties into thick chips, lightly brush with oil, salt, pepper and chilli flakes (for a bit of spice), then cook in the air fryer for 25 minutes at 180C. (Our potato wedges recipe goes into more detail.)

If you’re not a fan of BBQ sauce, then you can do slow cooked fajita instead.

Leftover meat creamy Cajun pasta bake

I’m sorry, here we have another “check out our full recipe” idea.

Like the tikka masala curry recipe above, you use a dessert leftover. On the rare occasion you have leftover cream, you can use it for a creamy Cajun pasta bake. You can either use leftover meat or vegetables, or a combination of both.

Having pasta will make a nice change from potatoes.

Giant Yorkshire pudding wraps

If you can stomach a roast round two, you can make some giant, flat Yorkshire puddings to wrap around a roast filling.

First things first: prepare your fillings. Slice some leftover meat – whether that be gammon, chicken, turkey, or beef – and cut your roasties into cubes or chips. If you’ve got any stuffing or vegetables left, you can warm them through ready to load in.

You can reheat your meat and spuds in your air fryer, oven, or microwave. At this point, you can also get started on some gravy.

Most people already have a Yorkshire pudding recipe, but if not, try ours. This used to be my go-to choice for leftover roast when my kids were little. It’s quite simple really:

Put a tablespoon of oil in an 8in cake tin and heat in the oven
When the oil’s hot, pour in your yorkie batter and place back in the oven at 200C for around five minutes, or until the edges have risen and are a nice golden colour
Once done, remove from the oven and load with your pre-prepared fillings
Drizzle over some gravy, but not too much otherwise your yorkie will lose its structure. Save the rest for dunking

Meal prep

After overindulging on Christmas day you might not be able to face any more roasted food. I know I need at least a month before being able to stomach another roast potato. In this case, meal prepping is a great way to prevent food from going to waste.

In freezable containers, portion up your leftovers, a bit of everything in each container. A spud or two, slices of meat, a handful of veg and you’ve got yourself a meal. When you defrost and reheat, make fresh gravy to serve it with. Freezing it with gravy will result in a very soggy reheated dinner.

If you don’t want to commit to roast dinners, you can always freeze by ingredient. We’ve got a big guide on ingredient prepping, but put simply, if you freeze one tub of broccoli, a bag of meat or Yorkshire puddings, you can defrost things individually and use them to make one of the meals above instead.