Stuff! [orichalcum]

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When I was little, I presumed that "stuffing" was a special brown vegetable we only had at Thanksgiving. I didn't realize till I was a teenager that it's basically wet bread with extra things. I think I was very ready to take things at face value as a child. There was magic cooking stuff in the fondue pot, my aunt's relationship with her female partner was entirely conventional, and stuffing grew on plants.

So, what do your families put in your stuffing? We're hosting Thanksgiving for the first time this year, and while I've made turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy before, I've never made more than the most basic stuffing. I went and bought a lot of Standard Stuffing Ingredients - onions, celery, sausages, oysters, dried cranberries, cremini mushrooms - but I don't know how they'll all go together os exactly what to do with them.

So, what do you like in your stuffing or dressing?

Also, I have found a recipe for a dark chocolate pecan pie. Is this heresy, blasphemy, or yummy?

I need a good cooking icon. Can Icontastic people create me one at some point? Also, a job hunt icon would be very useful. Perhaps with Indiana Jones, given my profession. I will sing your praises across the blogosphere.

Music:: Hooray for the pumpkin pie

location: home

Mood::

excited

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There are 38 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Chuck does a cornbread and andouille sausage stuffing that's to die for - he uses jalapeno cornbread, sausage, onion, celery, and such to evoke memories of his childhood eats. It's delicious, rich, and yummy!

That sounds similar to my family's stuffing, although spicier. My mom's is unsweetened cornbread, some weird sausage-in-a-tube substance (I have no idea what it is other than it's pork and tasty), parsley, heavy cream, onions sauteed in butter, sherry.

That stuff will kill you, though. It's soooo good.

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Sounds amazing!

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How much heavy cream and when does it go in?

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I'm afraid I don't have the recipe; my mom always makes it, I never have. A couple tablespoons? Maybe a quarter cup? But there's also sage in it, I think, and perhaps also turkey drippings. It doesn't cook in the bird, because otherwise the pork would be a risk.

The best I can remember is, you start by having the cornbread already made & crumbled; cook the sausage and drain it; saute the onion in plenty of butter; then add everything to the pan.

I'll try to let you know tomorrow when I go home and can take a look at the recipe.

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The recipe (from American Cooking):

-8 TBSP butter, melted
-1 1/2 cups finely chopped onion, sauteed in hte butter, then removed to a big bowl
-1 lb well-seasoned sausage meat, broken up & cooked in the same pan; then drained with a seive.
-(optional: saute the turkey liver in another 2 TBSP butter)
-add sausage to onions; add 6 cups crumbled dry unsweetened cornbread, some black pepper, 1/4 fresh chopped parsley, and 2 tsp thyme. Stir together gently with a large spoon.
-add 1/4 cup madeira or sherry and 1/4 cup heavy creamw gradually, to desired moistness.
-monkey.

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Thanks; you rock! I think I can actually do all of that. No chicken broth at all?

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Nope; that's the recipe (in condensed format). But keep in mind that this isn't an in-bird "stuffing", it's a side dish, so if you wanted to actually *stuff* the bird for real I can't recommend it for that!

It's really, really rich & moist as-is though. Hard to go wrong with 8 TBSP butter plus heavy cream.

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HERESY! I absolutely despise the tendency to put chocolate in pecan pie. Pecan pie is a very strong flavor as it is. (Or should be, when you're done putting in the bourbon. :) ) Not everything in life is improved with chocolate. That said, people must like it because it is sold that way in nearly every restaurant in NC.

I am a stuffing traditionalist--I just like onions and celery in it to give it crunch. But I tend to be picky, so things like cranberries and mushrooms and oysters are nonstarters for me anyway. I did once have a really interesting rice and beef based stuffing (with, iirc, raisins and maybe nuts?) at the home of a certain Greek friend of ours. But that was the only nontraditional stuffing I've had and enjoyed.

Disagree with meepodeekin: chocolate pecan pie is very yummy. (I may think this way, however, because I never liked pecan pie as a kid. Way too sweet without anything particularly interesting flavorwise beyond, well, sweet.)

My mom always used Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix. Then she'd add pecans or (one year) chestnuts - before you could get chestnuts in a can. Yummy. And giblets in the gravy. Gravy on stuffing is one of my favorite comfort foods.

I've not tried either stuffing or oysters, but I have the feeling that one prolly shouldn't mix meats in stuffing.

er, sausage or oysters, that should be.

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1) I am a big fan of traditional stuffing with bread and celery and lots of apples and raisins. But that's probably just because I really love baked apples and raisins.

2) I had chocolate pecan pie for the first time last month, and have to admit that it was pretty dang yummy.

1. You must have been so happy to marry into a Jewish family with feast foods like charoset! :) Apples in stuffing seems too sweet to me somehow.

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(laughs)

Indeed, I love charoset, and always take double servings at Passover! But if you don't add sugar, the apples aren't too sweet - just a nice counterpoint to the celery and chicken broth in the stuffing.

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You must have been so happy to marry into a Jewish family with feast foods like charoset

I, for one, prefer the chopped horseradish -- the really hot kind that leaves a curious caustic tingling throughout your sinuses. I could just sit there and eat the stuff, more or less straight out of the bottle. Of course, I have a very weak sense of taste and smell, and thus adore pretty much all foods with strong, nuance-free flavors.

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Have you ever eaten it grated straight off the root?

When horseradish became the food that filled that slot in the Passover seder, some rabbis warned against using it because they thought people would hurt themselves trying to eat the right amount. (This was centuries before the weak stuff mixed with beets that I eat.)

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Not only do we get a whole fresh root every year, but we also stock the super hot jar stuff. Well, we used to until one year a relative's airway swelled up in the middle of the seder and we had to call 911 when he stopped breathing. (He was fine in the end.) So, um, yeah, the rabbis might have been on to something on that one.

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Hmmm. I hate charoses and have to ask for the smallest allowable portion every year. Plus my nana makes it special for me without raisins. It's weird because I adore desserts, but it drives me crazy when things like fruit are too sweet.

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Stuffing in my family is pretty straightforward: onions, celery, parsley and celery leaves and lots of spices. I think Mom's trying a cornbread recipe this year, though.

It's so funny how entrenched people get about Thanksgiving stuff(ing). This year, for example, I suggested that we have sweet potatoes instead of mashed potatoes and the general family response was akin to, "You got WHAT tattooed and pierced?!"

YOU SUGGESTED WHAT?

I dislike the taste of sweet potatoes. I eat pumpkin pie and squash soup, but I dislike sweet potatoes either mashed or baked whole. What can you do?

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*laugh* I read this column a few years back about getting married, doing Thanksgiving with his family, and discovering that they do Thanksgiving wrong. Sausage! in the stuffing! Who puts sausage in the stuffing? Where's the pumpkin pie? What are these cherry pies doing here? What is wrong with you people? Etc.

I am perhaps fortunate that my in-laws a) don't celebrate Thanksgiving and b) live too far away anyway. Some year we'll do Christmas there, and it will be a barbecue in the middle of summer, and that will be weird. But nonthreatening.

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Heee. A few years ago, when we had a giant Thanksgiving that combined several branches of the family, we had four different kinds of cranberry sauce, because everyone insisted on having what THEY considered REAL cranberry sauce :)

I am eh on stuffing - I rarely eat it anyway. REAL Thanksgiving is sweet potato pie with marshmallows on top :)

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Marshmallows, blech. You're doing Thanksgiving wrong! ;)

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Yeah, I was just thinking - I'm glad we're just virtually family. :) Because the eh-stuffing thing would not go over well at either A's or my ancestral family tables.

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*sniff*

I'm going to be a bad influence on Mac and teach him the joys of marshmallows! It's all about watching the marshmallows melt in the oven...

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I'm not anti-marshmallow; it's just a bit sweet for my taste. But I am pro-stuffing. :)

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My family goes with the "cook everything" system. We have the traditional sweet potatoes with marshmallow that my dad can't live without, mashed potatoes with gravy, and some years we also have potato kugel. Plus stuffing. Which I suppose as a Southerner I should now call dressing. We also have a turkey and a tofurkey.

We also usually have at least one apple pie, one pumpkin pie, and one pecan pie for dessert. Key lime or lemon meringue for those who like tart. And maybe a cake or some ruggelach too. :)

Oh yeah, and we always have at least two types of cranberry sauce--fresh cooked with whole cranberries and straight out of the jar with the ridges still showing.

It's no wonder that one of our main family Thanksgiving traditions is a long walk in a local park before we eat. :)

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My family's stuffing is, and you will be horrified, based on store-brand white bread, preferably days old. We sweat a lot of onions and celery in butter, while we tear the bread into chunks. Then we toss the veggies and butter into the bread, and then we add as much poultry seasoning and pepper as we can stand. That's it. It tastes better cooked in the bird than in a pan, though basting the pan of stuffing with juices from the turkey roaster fixes that.

Recently, I have started cooking pieces of apple with the veggies, and pecans chopped in half as well. I also use olive oil and chicken broth instead of butter, since the year I took over Thanksgiving when mom was in the hospital. I have also done dried cranberries before, but I think this year I won't do that. Find out what

holmes_iv's brother does-- he does all of this stuff and more.

What's scary is the _amount_ we make: we heap our super-super-sized mixing bowl and a dutch oven with bread crumbs. It takes two onions and 4 or ribs of celery and 2-3 apples. Since I brought the apples and pecans idea home, I have become the stuffing preparer, particularly after the year I took over lead chef.

Also, I have found a recipe for a dark chocolate pecan pie. Is this heresy, blasphemy, or yummy?

I have tasted this stuff. Call it a delicious blasphemy if anything, but it's AMAZING.

In my opinion, it doesn't matter what you put in your stuffing, what matters is what you put your stuffing in. There is only one correct place to put your stuffing: inside the turkey. "Stuffing" that hasn't been stuffed is a lie and an abomination.

I agree, wholeheartedly, with

meepodeekin re. chocolate in pecan pie.

Sorry. Rant over.

Yeah, I've been debating this too but decided it was a separate topic. Current plan is to brine and smoke, which makes the stuffing a bit more complicated, but still probably doable.

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I disagree.

THE END.

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I prefer a simple stuffing, much like retsuko and digitalemur describe. Stuffing bread, onions and celery, margarine (butter if you can have dairy), poultry seasoning, an egg, salt, pepper. That's it. And it goes in the bird - if you wait until just before roasting to put it in, there shouldn't be any worry about food poisoning.
Chocolate pecan pie sounds delicious, but I've never had pecan pie in any form, so I'm no judge.

I grew up having Thanksgiving with my extended family, which included my Mom's 6 siblings and their kids and their kid's kids...so we always had a bit of everything. Mashed potatoes, candied yams, three kinds of jello or ambrosia salad, lasagna...yes, for some reason someone always brings some weird pasta dish to these things.

So for me, anything goes. Personally, the stuffing I made once from an America's Test Kitchen recipe using cornbread and sausage was the best. I dislike gluey stuffing that you sometimes get with bread.

As far as the pecan pie...I like it, but rarely eat it. It's too sweet and leaves me feeling over-sugared. I don't think chocolate will cure nor worsen that problem.

I tend to like very traditional bread and mirepoix stuffing, often with nuts, raisins, and some sort of interesting mushroom added. As a vegetarian, I use veggie broth instead of turkey broth to no ill effect. (Of course that is as long as it doesn't get dry, which is a danger with any oven cooked stuffing; but since you're smoking your turkey this is not an option. And cooking stuffing inside a turkey is not a good idea, no matter what "purists" say.).

My extended Thanksgiving family typically has chocolate pecan pie as one of the regulars. It is an indispensable tradition, although not one of my personal favorites. A little over sweet for my taste and sometimes dry, which is easily fixed with some vanilla ice cream. As a matter of preference, I prefer old standbys apple and pumpkin. I also love mock mince, but I am apparently unusual in that.

:)

No stuffing for me for the last four Thanksgivings, but I have discovered the wonders of sweet potatoes as a substitute starch. And I'm forever grateful to

myrt_maat for her flourless gravy recipe.

Are you gluten free? My brother has celiac, and my Mom has figured out how to do a good gluten free bread stuffing. I could get the recipe and info and pass it along, if you like.

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Oh, thanks so much for offering! I'm actually not celiac. I'm doing this. A lot of similar restrictions, tho.

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