Use Thanksgiving Leftovers for Kabocha Turkey Pasta

After all these pumpkin dishes, you may be pumpkin-ed out at this point, but here's one last dish you can make with any leftover pumpkin and turkey you may have, after the big day. It's a quick weeknight meal, but it also makes for a great appetizer course at a fall dinner party: kabocha turkey pasta.

Not only do the colors scream "AUTUMN!" the nutty browned butter and sweet pumpkin taste like fall. The list of ingredients may be small, but by letting the butter, shallots and pumpkin really brown, the Maillard Reaction does all the heavy lifting, producing a wonderfully complex array of flavors.

I did this one with leftover roast chicken, but you could really make this pasta with just about any protein you have sitting around, including turkey, ham, or fried tofu. If you don’t have any Kabocha sitting around, butternut squash or orange sweet potatoes (often called yams in the US) work great as well.