EditorAfter a couple decades of editing and indexing cookbooks, I took a stab at writing (a small!) one.
After the Feast brings together 25-ish of my favourite ways to use up the leftovers from big turkey dinners. The dishes span a variety of culinary traditions and techniques and use ingredients that should be relatively accessible to North American home cooks. I did my best to make the recipes easy to follow for people newer to cooking but flexible and adaptable so that more experienced cooks can customize them to their liking.
Most of the recipes revolve around turkey, as you might expect, but I’ve also included dishes that use common sides like mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and roasted vegetables. My aim is to give folks delicious, comforting ways to reduce food waste and breathe new life into their leftovers.
Each recipe has been thoroughly tested to ensure the measurements are accurate and results are tasty, and I’m confident that if you like turkey, you’ll find at least one dish in this cookbook that you’ll enjoy.
Accompanying most recipes are my janky, amateurish digital illustrations that ostensibly depict the finished dishes. They might evoke the same kind of uneasy uncanny valley feeling as AI-generated images, but I promise you that no AI was used in any part of creating this book. Why didn’t I just use photos (which would have been way the hell easier)? Because my food styling and photography skills are possibly even worse than my drawing skills, somehow. And early in this project I thought drawing might be relaxing?? It didn’t take many Procreate canvases to disabuse me of that notion, but by that time I was in too deep and had to see it through. As I worked my way through illustrating the many rice grains in my many rice dishes, I couldn’t help thinking of Mitch Hedberg’s timeless line: “Rice is great when you’re hungry and you want 2,000 of something.”
Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about having to pay for my bad art because you can have this book for FREE. The PDF of After the Feast costs nothing to download—I don’t ask for email addresses or subscriptions to a newsletter. No data collection, no gatekeeping, no strings attached. Just click to get the book.
That said, hardcover and paperback versions are available, and if you do choose to buy a print copy, two dollars from each print copy sold support food security and food sovereignty initiatives in Nunavut through the Qajuqturvik Community Food Centre. As of October 2025, the hunger crisis in Nunavut has become dire, especially with Indigenous Services Canada discontinuing the Inuit Child First Initiative’s Hamlet Food Voucher Program.
Online retailers like Amazon, Chapters-Indigo, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org will have print copies of the book, but you can also ask your local indie bookstore to order in a copy by giving them the ISBN:
- Hardcover ISBN 978-1-7782897-7-4
- Paperback ISBN 978-17782897-6-7
Like other titles from Hastily Assembled Books, my little self-publishing imprint, After the Feast is a fundraiser, so although I won’t personally be benefitting financially from sales, I do want it to succeed, so I’m asking for your help: please make up for the fact that I’m ass at marketing and promotion and spread the word about this book among your friends and family, review the book on review sites if you’re so inclined, and post about it on social media—perhaps tagging food people who might be interested. If you make any of the dishes, please tag me! (I’m @ivacheung.com on Bluesky, where I’ll announce the occasional cookbook giveaway.) Another excellent way to help support this book—for free—is to ask your local public library to buy it for their collection.
Shoutout to my pal Grace Yaginuma, editor extraordinaire, for her careful work and constructive criticism! There’s nothing I appreciate more as an editor than being edited by an eminently competent colleague and friend who appreciates good food as much as I do.
(There will be no October cartoon, for 👆️ exhaustion reasons, but I should be back with one in November!)