Tags
chicken, cornbread stuffing, duck, stuffing, Thanksgiving, traditional stuffing, turducken, turkey
Today is FRIDAY!!! Â Typically the day where my French Fridays with Dorie posts appear, but this week our boiler that supplies heat to our home broke and its been as cold inside as it is outside and I haven’t had much interest in cooking or baking and somehow managed to lose track of the days and about mid-day I realized I was going to miss my Dorie post this week! So I will have to do a double post next week to make-up for it, as we are just getting heat restored to our home and de-cluttering all our spaces since we had to move all sorts of things around and out-of-the-way to make room for the installation of the new boiler – which is a nightmare if you have never been through it, so we will be back with French Fridays next week!
That being said, as most of our friends know around here, my husband and I love to make turduckens once a year, usually for Thanksgiving and have now come to love making a variety of stuffings. We choose a new one for the duck layer every year and it’s just fun and delicious and a challenge we welcome! For those that are un-familiar with a turducken, it’s a chicken in a duck in a turkey. All three bird are de-boned, except for the legs of the turkey, to keep the turkey shape, and then laid upon each other, wrapped up with different stuffings in between each layer and baked at a low temperature, basically all day or at least 10-12 hours. We started this tradition just before we got married and have not had one year where we haven’t made one for either Thanksgiving or Christmas.
So I jumped at the chance to provide a cornbread stuffing for this year’s Thanksgiving since we decided against making a turducken for the day. I use my basic cornbread recipe, doubled and then add the obligatory onions and celery and then season it with creole seasoning -whichever one you like best! That’s the whole recipe! … Ok, I will outline it at the end of this post, but its pretty easy, basic, fast and easy!
Only there was one issue this year. It apparently only tasted like cornbread with bits of onion and celery. Nothing else.
UGH.
That’s what you get for being pregnant! I tasted it before it went into the oven and it tasted really over-seasoned so in an effort to avoid a repeat of the other night’s meal where I made some nice roasted brussel sprouts and mashed potatoes,…or so I thought, I had hardly seasoned the potatoes with salt and my husband declared it a mushy salt lick, so this time I stopped when I thought it was obviously over-seasoned but I should have added much more seasoning. It’s just not easy to cook for others when you are pregnant – the reason why I was happy to just do the baking for this year’s get-together. Maybe I should have just stuck to it? *shrugs*
I also decided to make a traditional stuffing, since it is what I like best and was appealing the most to me on this particular day, and that is made just like the cornbread stuffing but you use just basic salt and pepper seasoning instead of creole seasoning and I just buy a bag of bread crumbs at the store, cut up some onions and celery, moisten it with chicken or vegetable stock and bake it until it’s nice and crispy on top and smelling awesome. This one turned out great, of course! That just goes to show how different your taste buds can really be when you are pregnant or even just sick… things are off just enough to make a difference.
Keep your eyes peeled around Christmas time in a few weeks, we are certainly going to be making a turducken before the year has run out!
Ingredients for Cornbread Stuffing:
- 2-4 C chicken or vegetable stock
- 3 medium onions
- 1 bunch of celery
- one double recipe of
- 4 TBS melted butter
Bake the cornbread, allow it to cool, then cut into large pieces and crumble it in a large bowl or Ziploc bag.
Pre-heat the oven to 350F.
Then medium dice the onions and celery and mix it in a 9 X13 baking dish with the cornbread crumbs. Moisten the mixture with 2-4 cups of stock until everything is slightly wet, then pour the melted butter over the mixture and stir it around again until combined.
Bake for 20-40 minutes until the top has become golden and the mixture is only slightly damp throughout.
Or bake to your liking. Also, if you like, you can take the diced onions and celery and saute them with the butter in a frying pan just until the onions start to become translucent, then mix them with the crumbs and stock and bake.