 It's Friday night in the A and you know what that means. Kelly Price and Tori McElhady coming at you on Rise Up Tonight, presented by AT&T. Well, we are stuffed like our friend Roger here. We are happy. The Falcons won all good vibes as we lean even further into the most wonderful time of the year, which is Christmas season, but also meaningful football season. Like Roger, I have absolutely no complaints. All right, well it is the day after Thanksgiving. We wanted to give it a little love as it doesn't really get a lot of appreciation these days. It does get a little overlooked, but we're going to talk about things that we are thankful for with this Falcons team as we head into the back end of the season. Let's huddle up. Let's huddle up with Kelly and Tori on the world of Falcons football. I have got to say, I think the Falcons are finally listening to us, Tori. They came out with what I thought was a great game plan on offense, playing to Marcus Mariotas and his team's strengths. I'm thankful today that we got to see their most balanced performance of the year offensively. 131 yards through the air, 149 on the ground, distributed across the stat sheet for nine different playmakers. I asked Marcus Mariota about this balanced offensive attack after the game and he was actually the one who brought up exactly what you're talking about regarding spreading the ball out. His words exactly, it makes us tough to stop. He also said it helps when your offensive line is dominating the line of scrimmage, which they were. The Falcons offensive line was one of the highest graded O-lines of week 11. You got to give credit where credit is due for those five guys up front. Good confidence builder for them as they face a tough front in Washington this week. Also fun fact, the Falcons have rushed for more than 1,750 yards through the first 11 games for the first time since 2006. Speaking of the run game and thankfulness, how thankful are we for CP? Not only does he continue to be a huge part of this offense but he finally got to the top of the mountain. He's been climbing his whole career, setting the NFL record with his ninth career kickoff return for a touchdown. That was such a pure moment too as the whole team came over and celebrated with him after. Oh yeah, you gotta love that for a guy like CP. A journey man, if you will. A ten year veteran who's experiencing a career renaissance in his 30s with absolutely no sign of slowing down. I mean, the story is just, mwah, chef's kiss. But nothing compares in my opinion to what Grady Jarrett said in the locker room after the win when he was asked about seeing CP make history. He said point blank that the Falcons are a better team when Cordero Patterson is on the field. It's so true, he does so much more than just on the field work for them. Meanwhile, this defense was eating as well. Four sacks for the second time this season, nine tackles for loss. Five hits on Justin Fields, a clutch game icing interception, eliminating the NFL's best rushing team on the ground to 160 yards, including Justin Fields. This type of quarterback that has really given Falcons fits in recent years. But I especially have to shout out the defense for rebounding after a terrible game in Carolina. Talking to some of these defensive linemen recently, you really got a sense that they took that Carolina game personally. They knew the challenge that awaited them facing the league's best Russian offense in Chicago and their game plan was actually very clear. Do not let Justin Fields beat you and he didn't. I do think this game is another evolution for this defense and what I mean by that is they saw what they needed to fix, they put a game plan together and they executed that game plan. I know that sounds very simple, but this is actually a really good step in the right direction for this unit. And of course we are thankful for fun fits today and every day. Time now for walking in presented by Wells Fargo. We'll start with so many Falcons fans favorite player on the roster. Roster Desmond Ritter giving y'all fuel for your high trade with this fire fit. It is fire to me because it seems warm, cozy and design are all the most important aspects of fashion as far as I'm concerned. Y'all know I lovingly call out the Ritter Ruckus any chance I get because I do love y'all, but I think Kelly and I agree that this sweater is ruckus worthy. Another ruckus worthy sweater with Tyler Algier. Loyal viewers of the show, Notori and I are obsessed with this sweatshirt specifically. It is fun to see the players embrace it. I'm a huge fan of pretty much anything Algier does so really you can do no wrong. Tyler, if you're watching this, Kelly and I would like to be your besties so we can wear our matching Sunday sweaters. Yes. Also, I too throw up the panic peace sign whenever a camera is pointed my way. Another reason for us all to be friends. Not the panic peace sign. Let's wrap it up with Darren Hall, whose jacket kind of gives me retro NASCAR vibes. It is also bedazzled and disco balls very much having a moment recently. So there's a lot of fun energy going on here, which checks out for Darren as a person. Yes, and NASCAR was literally the first word that popped into my head when I saw this fit. Also, I must say that yellow is quite the choice, but when it's pulled off, it's very striking. And I think Darren does indeed pull it off. We love Christmas season, but that Thanksgiving spread is no joke, at least in my house. We asked some Falcons what their favorite turkey day foods are in our question of the week. That's difficult. I want to say yams, but a really good mac and cheese is tough to beat. But if I had to pick one, I would probably go yams. Ooh, my mother's macaroni and cheese. She just has the magic hands. Yeah. Cranberries. Cranberries are homemade. I really don't discriminate if you can look at me, so. Pumpkin pie maybe? I don't know. Depends. Our hot takes segment is later in the show, Troy. You don't have to tell us that Cranberries is the best food. That's definitely a hot take. I was shocked. I don't think I've ever heard that before. Ever. Yeah, that was a very strange one. Well, coming up later in the show, a very fun day after Thanksgiving, in the nest segment coming at you guys, Tori and I headed to the kitchen to whip up a delicious Thanksgiving leftover dish that you can enjoy while watching some football the rest of the season. Get you a girl who can do both, all right? Plus Grady Jiric gives back here in Atlanta for Turkey Day. That story is next on Rise Up Tonight. Rise Up Tonight is presented by AT&T and brought to you by Georgia Lottery. Today could be the day. By Home Depot, how doers get more done? By Mercedes Benz, the best of nothing. And by Truits, committed to a better future. The Falcons flocked all over the Atlanta metro area to give back this Turkey Day. For Grady Jiric, all he had to do was pull up a few minutes away from Mercedes Benz Stadium. Time to rise up for Atlanta, brought to you by Truist. Jiric and his family spent Saturday afternoon handing out turkeys to families at Lindsay Street Baptist Church. And just like his style of play, Grady likes to get right in the middle of things. To be able to see the smiles on people's faces is priceless and it's just a reminder of, you know, why I go so hard, you know, it's more than just producing on the field and being a good football player, it's about being a good person, being a warrior for God and just being, somebody just want to give back, use the influence to make the world a better place and just wear my feet at right now. You know what I'm saying? Controlling where I can control and trying to find a way to just be better. Well, Grady is a part of a defensive line group that looks really different here late in November than it did this off season or even in training camp. Jarrett to Quan Graham, Anthony Rush, Marlon Davidson and Vincent Taylor made up that group earlier. Now with Graham injured, it's Grady and Abdullah Anderson, Jayla Dalton, Timmy Horn. Those kind of one-time bubble players are really making impacts now though, aren't they? They sure are and this way, the way this defensive line has morphed into what it is now is actually really fascinating to me. The players you may have thought we're going to make a difference are no longer in Atlanta. Crazy. The players that you didn't even know are lining up alongside Grady Jarrett. It's quite the shift and I'll say this, if these interior linemen continue to hold their own, I think this is a major win for almost every level of the Falcons organization, the scouting department for seeing the potential in them, the coaches for developing them and the players themselves for putting in the work. Absolutely. Well, speaking of depth, with Kyle Pitts going to injured reserve, the Falcons are hoping their tight end depth comes in clutch as well. We'll talk a little bit more about that in our hot takes later on. Plus we're helping you figure out what you need to do with those Thanksgiving leftovers that you keep staring at in your fridge. The rock star chef Justin Robinson joins us next for some cooking fun. Rise Up Tonight is presented by AT&T and brought to you by Georgia Lottery. Today could be the day. By Home Depot, how doers get more done? By Mercedes-Benz, the best of nothing and by Truits, committed to a better future. Welcome back to Rise Up Tonight. Let's head in the nest with Kelly Torri and this week's special guest brought to you by Mercedes-Benz. Well, it is the day after Thanksgiving so I know you guys have a bunch of leftovers in those fridges that you guys wanna figure out maybe what you're gonna do with. We have Chef Jay Robb in the nest list. You know him from Chopped, you know him from MasterChef. He's gonna give us an idea of maybe what you can do. We've got a great looking turkey here, a bunch of fun ingredients. What are we gonna do today? Yeah, I'm telling you so. It's the day after Thanksgiving. Everyone always has a lot of turkey leftover. Whether you smoked it, whether you fried it, it does not matter. This is the go-to brunch recipe since we're in the brunch recipe. We love brunch. We do love brunch. We love brunch recipe. We're gonna make a jalapeno cornbread waffle with a turkey fritter. So I'm gonna tell you what to do with all that leftover meat that you may have for Thanksgiving. We're gonna start on that jalapeno cornbread waffle. Real simple to make. You can take some pre-made ingredients like the pre-made cornbread mix or the pre-made pancake mix to make your waffles. If you wanna make it from scratch, you totally can too. I have a lot of recipes, especially this one on my Instagram as well if you wanna do it from scratch. But for here, just to make it quick and simple to show you how quick it is, we're gonna take some pre-made pancake mix and some cornbread mix. We're gonna go ahead and put that in the bowl and combine it. Add a little bit of vanilla extract, okay? So I'm gonna add in... No measuring cups, just a knife. Yeah, just gotta use your senses. I love using my senses in the kitchen. Go ahead and crack in one egg. Perfect. I'm gonna go ahead and whisk that in. So what I did so far is just minced up a little bit of jalapeno and I poured in some milk. You wanna do it incrementally just so that it doesn't become too watery. So you can always add more if it's too thick. So you can see the consistency is really thick and that's perfectly what we want because we can keep adding milk, but you can't take away that milk. So that's a common mistake in the kitchen. You wanna add in a little bit of your liquid incrementally as you mix it in. And then we got one more ingredient that we gotta add. We got a big kick from that jalapeno so you wanna kinda tone it down a little bit with some sweetness and we got some brown sugar. We do love that. That sounds awesome. Now, also just to elevate it, this is a syrup that I found that I really love. You know, you have your maple syrup or you have vanilla bean and fused syrup, but this is a whistle pig maple syrup. Ooh. So you got a little bit of whiskey, you know, a little holiday cheer to it, you know what I'm saying? There we go. Now we're talking brunch. Now. So that's definitely something that you can probably check on their website, probably to buy it, but I'm just coming from tasting it and serving it to my clients. It's hands down the best syrup that I've had. What kinda makes it the best? So it's just having that whiskey-infused flavor into it so you feel like you get a little bit of that on your tongue, especially pairing, it pairs really well with turkey as well. So. And all this stuff, other than that, is just stuff you kinda get at your local grocery store. Nothing is like crazy ingredients. Nothing crazy. Yeah. Any local grocery store ingredients cheaper than $10, you can find this and just really spruce it up, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. You got leftover turkey, why don't I make some waffles with it and just do a different thing. Impress the family. I'm telling you. Hey, guys, on Rise Up Tonight, I saw what to do with these leftovers and this is what we're gonna do here. So we're gonna add in a nice quantity of brown sugar cause those jalapenos are gonna be popping. We're gonna mix that in and now we're getting that brown consistency of our batter that we want. And then as you can see, it's kinda getting that perfect consistency. So I'm just gonna get all those clumps out and keep rocking and rolling. We're gonna pop the top, Kelly. I'm gonna put this back so you can get your hands dirty, girl. Okay. It's a good thing that you're doing this. I'm gonna stand over here and watch ya. I need you to spray the pan on the waffle maker. Both sides? Yeah, both sides. Okay. I can do that. Thanks. I'm gonna go ahead and add in a little bit of that. Perfect. Ooh, can already hear it sizzling. Do y'all smell the cornbread a little bit? A little bit. Close that down. Go ahead and give it a turn to your left. There you go. Pop the top. Pop the top. Pull it up. The top one. There you go. Oh, I see it. Oh, oh, we got it. Oh, we got it. Oh, we got it. You're double digging now. Oh my God. I did not know that was coming. I'm telling you, you get you a good waffle maker. You can knock this out twice as fast. Wow. When he said pop the top, I was pulling so hard. I was pulling so hard. I'm pulling like a magic trick right there. Wow. All right. I'm going to go ahead and sit this down, and we can close that down and just let it go. And we'll get a little beat notification once we're ready to go. All right. Now that we got our waffle done, we're going to go ahead and get started on our turkey fritter. So, what we're going to go ahead and do is take a nice slice of that breast. That's a good looking turkey on there. Yeah, so this was cooked literally perfectly. Looks great. I'm going to take this and sit this right here on the side. So we're just going to mince up this turkey again. It doesn't have to be pretty. Leftover Thanksgiving turkey is not going to be the prettiest at all. So, took a little bit of the breast, took a little bit of the leg, and we're just combining this into our bowl. We're going to take a little peek-a-boo on our waffles and see how they're looking. Oh my goodness. Ooh. Hello. That's a good morning to you right there. All right. Got his brunch. Where's that plate right here? Okay, so I'm going to let you grab the tongs. All right. Grab that waffle. You got it, Kelly. Oh man, it's really in there. I didn't pay on it very well. Oh, no, it came out very nicely. Nice. Love it. Man, I got to get one of these double-decker up. I'm telling you, it definitely makes the work a lot easier. I'm going to flip that. So we got the whiskey maple. Typically, when you see an old-fashioned, what fruit do they put in the old-fashioned? It's an orange, right? It's that orange peel. Exactly. So using that orange zest to really bring in that flavor of our turkey fritter, because that whiskey maple syrup is going on top of it. Nice. So you're doing a great job. Thank you. I've never done this before. This is like live. We're trying this live. We're doing it live. We're doing it live. So I'm going to take a little smoked paprika. We're going to mix up, just grinding up that cheese and that orange zest and that turkey and just kind of shredding it down a little bit with my finger so it's not too chunky so that we can form that fritter mixture. Because when you squeeze it, it kind of forms and holds its shape. And the yolk or the whole egg itself is going to act as glue. Okay. Okay. All right, so what are we doing with this? So, again, we have our minced up turkey, our flour, corn starch and ranch dry season mixture. And then we put my signature bass player season that's going to be coming out later on in December in here. So we got a nice bass. However, what we got to do is we have to make sure that we can get that ingredients to kind of be adhesive. Because once that egg yolk hits, that's a wrap. So while it's dry, I'm trying to use my fingertips just to kind of get a little bit more shredded. So you can kind of see the difference. It's a little bit more shredded. And that's how you're going to get that fritter. If not, it might fall apart and not be exactly what you want. I'm going to take this. I'm going to ball it up. Can you lift it? Yep, lift it and put it on the rack. Just pull it back to you a little bit. No, no, no. Back on there, down, down. We'll back, back, back, back seat and then it clings on. Oh, okay. Yeah, there you go. All right. So we got four in there. We're going to go ahead and go with that. We can go ahead and drop that in. Send them. Send them. We'll send. Perfect. All right. All right, that takes like two minutes. These are ready to roll. We have our waffle. I'm going to go ahead and sit this right here. We're going to hit it with a little bit of honey over top. Ooh. Just like that. A nice little drizzle. We're going to take the tongs. We have our beautiful turkey fritters that I'm just going to lay right there. Look at that. So this beats chicken and waffles anyway. I mean, you can't eat that. I'm saying. So we're going to sit these turkey fritters. They're looking at, ooh, one fell. I'll let this one be a test trial. You know what I'm saying to taste it. But then from here, all we've got to do, guys, is take some of that syrup over top. Ooh. Oh, that looks like that. Look at that. That's beautiful. And that is a holiday treat that you don't want to miss. That is awesome. Well, thank you so much for showing us how to do that. That was actually really simple. It seems like, you know, we made a mess here, but it really wasn't too hard. No, I mean, we did it in only a few minutes. I always think that cooking lasts forever, but I mean, this is pretty quick. And look at that. And that's with the herbs. Look at how beautiful that looks. There we go. Thank you so much for your time. Now, thanks so much for having me for sure. We appreciate it. ChefJRob.com. Also, your Instagram and your social media as well. Check him out. You definitely want to be able to see a lot more recipes like this in his cookbook as well. Great job, y'all. Thank you. Well, we know that Arthur Smith is pushing the narrative of pumpkin pie as being the best Thanksgiving food as we learned earlier. Well, let's give our post-Turkey Day hot takes. We'll warm them up for you like some microwave leftovers that we're all munching on for the next couple of weeks, right? Well, you know what was spicy? When Taylor Heinecke averaged 8.6 yards per carry and ran all over this falcons defense in week four of last season. Spicy enough to give falcons fans everywhere more indigestion than that big Thanksgiving meal yesterday. I don't think they're going to let that happen again, especially after we saw them effectively limit Justin Fields, who was so hot coming into Sunday's game. So the narrative that I would like to see the Dirty Birds dispel this week, that mobile quarterbacks can have their way with them. Hey, I like it. Now, for my hot take, unless you've been living under a rock, you know the falcons have received some pretty tough news this week that cow pits will be out for quite a while with a significant knee injury. And while we hope for a speedy recovery for KP, the falcons now have to figure out what to do without him. And let's get one thing straight. You're not going to replace cow pits, but what you can do is figure out ways to have multiple players help carry the load. Michael Pruitt and Parker Hesse come to mind at that tight end position. So my hot take this week with more on their plate, I think Pruitt and Hesse will not just survive, but I think they'll thrive with this chance. I like it. I like it a lot. And as we saw last week, you know, they've limited a really hot team coming in here to Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Washington now winning five of their last six. Another opportunity for them to really stop a hot team coming in. All right. Well, we are so thankful for you guys who watch us on Friday nights. I hope you're Thanksgiving and your weekend is just as wonderful and just as great as the rest of the week. Thanks for staying up late with us on Rise Up Tonight. Good night.