Making Chili With Leftover Thanksgiving Turkey

I love chili. As far as I’m concerned, nothing warms the soul quite like a steaming hot bowl of chili. So when we were looking for something to do with our leftover Thanksgiving turkey, my mind naturally drifted to… Chili!

I’ve written in the past about our Super Bowl chili recipe, which is one of my all-time favorites. It’s very simple, yet delicious. Here’s a quick rundown of the recipe:

1 lb. ground beef chopped turkey
1 cup chopped onions
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
1 14-16 oz. can diced tomatoes (or break up if whole)
1 14-16 oz. can chili beans
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. chili powder
1/4 tsp. oregano

In the interest of health, we often swap ground turkey in for ground beef. So why not try chopped Thanksgiving turkey?

Based on the amount of turkey that we had left over (see below), we figured that we had about enough for a quadruple batch:

Thus, we broke out the ingredients and got to work:

Here’s a quick look at what it looks just prior to cooking:

Because the turkey had already been cooked and seasoned, I decided to let it simmer extra long (about two hours) before serving. Thus, by the time it was ready to eat, there wasn’t so much as a trace of “Thanksgiving” flavor — it had been fully replaced with chili flavor. Once it’s done, it can be served in a bowl (with cheese, sour cream, chopped green onions, etc.) or plain over chips like our ten year old likes it:

All in all, this was a very simple and delicious way to use up our leftover turkey. Highly recommended!

As an aside, there are few things in life more rewarding than throwing together a big pot of turkey chili while a three year old stands on a kitchen stool repeatedly asking “Can I have some more turkey, daddy?”