How to Repurpose Your Holiday Food Gifts
If you're vocal about your love of food (like we are), you can pretty much count on your family and friends giving you food gifts for the holidays. There's no way around it, and why should there be? Getting food is great! Still, there can come a time when things get a bit ... out of hand: 11 fruitcakes, a half-dozen boxes of clementines, and enough panettone to feed the whole of Europe. But don't panic; you can repurpose these gifts. With the right recipes and a little creativity, these excesses can become novel ingredients.
Danny Kim1/6Fruitcake
A poem: When its appeal at last wears thin / just turn it into bread puddin'. (Or, if you're feeling more adventurous, put it in a panini press with some mild cheddar; the sweet and savory combination turns it into something new.)
2/6Panettone
If your appetite for panettone doesn't go stale eventually, the panettone itself will. Do what one usually does with stale bread: make French toast. As our Test Kitchen has proclaimed, "almost any spongy substance soaked in eggs, cooked on a buttered griddle, and covered in sugar will taste good." This is true, and since panettone is already so sweet, you can leave the sugar out. Try adapting this sugar-crusted French toast with honeyed apples or caramelized French toast with cinnamon and berries, omitting the sweet stuff as you see fit.
3/6Clementines
They're delicious, but box after box of them can be hard to handle, and you'll want to use them before they get moldy. Start with a clementine negroni or two, then get cooking: chicken paillards with clementine salsa and halibut with clementine gremolata are good places to start.
5/6Pears
Try them in this cranberry, pear, and ginger chutney, or—and we know you already knew this—make a spiced-pear pie with them.
6/6Candy Canes
These are perfect for a variety of desserts: chocolate peppermint bark uses them to nice effect, or you can warm them up in some peppermint hot chocolate. For the true cane devotee, try double chocolate-peppermint crunch cookies.
