An easy recipe that combines puff-pastry cases, to be filled with your poultry leftovers from any holiday meal and a home-made béchamel sauce, to become an impressive starter to a meal or to be served by two VOL-AU-VENT per guest with a salad as a main meal.

This version combines poultry, regular or wild mushrooms, some extras for aromatics and a béchamel sauce made with chicken as well as mushroom stock, for extra flavor. 

Mushroom stock is easy to make if you have mixed dried mushrooms that you can soak in hot water but if you plan on using regular fresh mushrooms, then simply boil all of the chopped mushroom stems in double their volume in water and a pinch of salt and it’ll be just fine. 

And if you’re feeling creative, then make a combination chicken bones (that you’ve broken up) and mushroom stems stock with just a bit of onion, carrot, celery, garlic, bay leaf, salt, pepper and a teaspoon of vinegar, for an even less wasteful approach on how to use leftovers to create a new meal.

The only question is will you buy the vol-au-vent puff-pastry cases beforehand and have handy in your pantry when you need them or will you make them yourself ? That’s up to you, no judgement here, especially if you’ve just organized a huge meal and you just want to deal with the leftovers as easily as possible. I get it ! As I’ve said before, vol-au-vent puff-pastry cases are tastier when home-made and less dry so if you have the courage, see the recipe here and adapt it to what you need.

For this recipe, the finished creamy filling should be equal to 3 cups, for 6 large vol-au-vent, thus ½ cup per puff-pastry case, but you can also make 12 smaller versions that require only ¼ cup filling each.

You can adjust the béchamel white or beige sauce to what ingredients you have. You can use more milk or even some light cream and simply adjust it to how much chicken and/or mushroom stock you have around.

Anyways, winter is slowly creeping up on us, here in Paris and it’s quite nice and I can smell it in the air even though most leaves are still on the trees. This also implies that I’m obviously impatient to get some winter holiday decorations put up, but I’ll wait until December 1st … :)