You’ve had the big Thanksgiving dinner. You’ve eaten dessert. Everyone is still at the house, and you’re about to bust out the turkey for round two of sandwiches! Wait – here’s a new idea for leftovers! We decided to shake up our sandwiches this year and serve Cranberry-Chipotle Turkey Sliders. They’re quick, easy and fun to serve. These are perfect holiday halftime show sliders because you can make them in under 20 minutes.
The only things you might need to get ahead of time are the chopped chipotle chiles in adobo sauce and some ciabatta rolls. You’ve probably got everything else! -- I’ll even walk you through this step-by-step in case you are in turkey overload and can’t concentrate.
Begin by melting 2 tablespoons butter in a 2-quart saucepan until sizzling. You know it’s going to be good when the recipe begins with butter!
Next add 1 cup chopped onion and cook for a few minutes until softened. Anyone bother you today? If so, that’s the person to help you chop onions in the kitchen! I happened to have onions left over from making the stuffing.
Add 4 cups shredded cooked turkey (the recipe says you can do chicken, too, but that’s not very Thanksgiving-like.) After cooking our Thanksgiving turkey to perfection, it shredded easily using two forks.
Here’s the kick to the recipe: look for chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. It comes in a small can in the international foods section of your grocery store. Pull out a couple of chiles and chop them. Two to three peppers will give you the 2 tablespoons that the recipe calls for.
You can make this spicier by adding more chiles.
To thicken the sauce a bit, sprinkle 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour over the turkey mixture. At this point, I was only 10 minutes into making the recipe. This is a slam dunk for an under 20-minute meal.
Stir in 1 cup turkey or chicken broth.
It’s always more fun when we cook “in theme” at our house! We made an appearance in our local 5k run in the morning, so of course we needed to wear our hats for round two of turkey day snacks!
Continue cooking and stirring the turkey until it is hot and bubbly. Ours only took a few minutes.
While it is cooking, you have plenty of time to make the spread, which is simple and amazing! Place 1 cup whole berry cranberry sauce and 1/2 cup mayonnaise in a small bowl and mix together. Make sure you crush all the berries if they are still whole.
Now it’s time to make the sandwiches. Warm and slice the ciabatta rolls. For this recipe, you will want about 16 of them. In my grocery store, that was 2 bags of rolls from the deli bakery section. I knew we were serving these ahead of time, so I had them pre-sliced. Time for lettuce! Place 1 lettuce leaf onto the bottom half of each ciabatta roll, like this:
Then cut 8 slices Deli American - (about 3/4 of a pound when you go to the deli counter) into quarters.
Place the Deli American on top of the lettuce pieces. The easiest thing to do at this point is to make an assembly line. Add 1/4 cup of the turkey mixture on top of the lettuce and cheese.
We’re at 18 minutes and counting. It sounds like halftime is coming soon – we are looking good in the kitchen time-wise!
Spread about 1 to 2 tablespoons of the cranberry mayo spread onto the top half of the rolls.
Place the top half of the slider roll on the sandwich! Ready to go!
The longest part of preparation was shredding the turkey. The prep time says 15 minutes; I would say that I was able to get things together and get this made in about 20 minutes – perfect timing for my round two Thanksgiving crew during halftime.
My Thanksgiving gobbler said it was a “thumbs up” sandwich! I hope you try this quick and easy recipe for Cranberry-Chipotle Turkey Sliders. Leave a comment to let me know what you think.
Alexandra is paid to write for the Recipe Buzz® Blog.