The menu:

• Roast turkey, tomato, green onion, sauteed mushrooms, and feta on rosemary foccaccia; topped with feta and rosemary, sage and thyme mayonnaise
• “The Wedge of Light” roasted potato wedges (source: Looneyspoons, p.141)
• 20 Bees Chardonnay, 2005
• Baked apples (source: Simple Baked Apples, Allrecipes.com)

I had a bag of white turkey meat left over from Thanksgiving last weekend, which probably has at least a few of you shuddering right now. I have had the experience of holding into turkey for too long, I have known the eye-watering stench that leaps up and punches your nose when you open the bag, I have fought the battle of clearing the air again afterwards.

Happily, the turkey passed the nose test this morning, so I knew I had at least one more good day out of it. The question was, what to do with just enough poultry to make a couple of good sandwiches, but not enough to make anything else in the slightest?

My usual dietary source of turkey is a little deli near where I work, the tiny but incredibly delicious Agincourt Bakery & Cafe. For about six bucks, you can buy a sandwich there that’s as thick as your arm and as big around as your head. Made by a little Italian woman who will start building your sandwich, observe you maternally, conclude that you are too skinny, and then double the meat portion, the food there makes me sad that I was born with only one stomach.

Tragically, I don’t have even one maternal Italian woman living in my house, so it was up to me to pick up the game while I was at the grocery store. The only thing I had to add to the usual shopping was a loaf of foccaccia and some feta cheese, and since my local food depot caters to the Italian demographic, I had a good set to pick from. The rest — the tomatoes, green onion, mayo, various herbs — were all on-hand already or kicking around the vegetable drawer, begging for sweet release.

As for the side dish, if you don’t have Looneyspoons, Crazy Plates or any of those series, you really owe yourself the time to look them over. They are fraught with completely cheese-dick humor, and it’s totally embarrassing to recite the names of the recipes; on the other hand, they’re all very healthy, and they make a special point of illustrating how to compensate for a lack of fat with a wealth of flavor. The potato wedges have been a standby with my family since they got a hold of the books, and so I figured they were worth a try.

They were worth a try, and good God, so was the sandwich. With the oven hot already from the potatoes, I stuck the sandwich in for about five minutes just to toast the bread lightly and warm the sandwich, which was well worth the wait. I sliced it four ways, and ended up wrapping half of it. Because I’m a total glutton, I had the other half of the whole thing tonight; over the course of the week, though, I expect I’ll end up eating only quarters.

The wine turned out to be really good, incidentally. I know I had expressed my doubts about it earlier, particularly because I don’t love Chardonnay all that much to begin with. It ended up being sweet, light and flavorful though, without the oak-barrel burn that I loathe so completely.

I don’t actually eat dessert all that often, but I bought some Macintosh apples last week for 99 cents a pound, which probably should have been a clue. They were mushy and gross, getting mushier and grosser through the week, and so today it was either throw them away or find something useful to do with them. Baked apples are a pretty easy recipe that doesn’t add too much more than sugar, and it’s pleasingly autumnal to have the house full of the smell of cinnamon, sage, cloves and apples as they bubble away in the oven.

The apple recipe is dead easy and takes about six minutes to throw together, if you’ve got everything in the pantry already. I screwed it up, so it came out looking more like baked barf than browned apples (and thus no picture - I love you too much). All the same, though, they taste like apple pie filling in all the right ways. You know the only thing more pleasant than smelling sweetened apples and spices floating from the kitchen? Happily eating them while you’re watching the baseball game.

Happy Sunday, and I hope you’re eating well.