copyright Bettina Network, inc. 2011
The request for my Thanksgiving stuffing recipe is a difficult one to fill. It is really my grandmother’s and to sit down and even just think about it brings tears to my eyes and many memories of my early youth.
Thanksgiving was a fun day at our house. My grandmother didn’t invite anyone to dinner – but somehow lots of people came. I think of where I live now and it would be sacrilege to just show up at someone’s door on any holiday without being invited and expect to be well treated and invited to stay for dinner without a lot of tension in the air and in the person’s voice who opened the door. How sad for them!
Our Thanksgiving turkey was raised in our back yard – as was our Christmas goose. My grandmother didn’t like eating meat she didn’t know what it had been fed or who raised it – so we raised our own – in the middle of New Orleans, LA. It was almost as much fun as watching my grandmother prepare the turtle she used as the center of her courtbouillion – which we pronounced (euphemistically written) ‘coo bi yon’.
We always had corn bread with breakfast on Thanksgiving morning because we needed the corn bread later for the stuffing. So make enough corn bread to serve for breakfast with enough left over to stuff the turkey. PLEASE DO NOT put sugar, maple syrup or any kind of sweetener in your corn bread, it will ruin the dressing.
The turkey dressing recipe follows:
Chop – one onion, one green pepper, two or three stalks celery. If you want a stronger taste in the stuffing from your vegetables you can use however many onions, etc. that are more to your liking.
Sauté them in a large deep skillet in which you put half olive oil and half butter.
Add seasonings – the same seasonings you are putting on your turkey – thyme, oregano, sage, salt and cayenne pepper.
Stir the vegetables until they are well mixed and the onions begin to soften and you are satisfied that the pot of ingredients are now lightly cooked.
Add about 1/2 pound ground beef (or sometimes sausage), one pound shrimp – cut into small pieces, oysters to taste with their liquor, the insides from the turkey – the liver, gizzard, etc., and mix with the vegetables in the cooking pot until the shrimp turn pink.
Once you feel your dressing is nice and lightly cooked add four to six organic eggs – which have been whipped as though you were going to scramble them, about 1/2 to one cup whole milk or even heavy cream, and mix all of this together.
Turn your corn bread into crumbs along with using your whole wheat bread that you normally use for meals, etc. into crumbs and add these to the stuffing – about half and half, but if you have more of one than the other – no problem. Add enough to absorb any liquid from the dressing. You want a nice, almost, but not quite dry stuffing to put in the turkey. Take into consideration that the juices from the turkey will run through the stuffing as the turkey cooks.
No, Virginia, we don’t cook the dressing outside the turkey. Never have for several generations and every one is alive, well and lived into their nineties or at least well past their middle eighties. And no one died nor got sick from my grandmother’s turkey stuffing.
Wait until the turkey cooks and make sure you get a small plate of dressing to taste before you serve the turkey. You want to act nice and proper and not shock your guests with just how much turkey stuffing you eat over Thanksgiving. Once you eat your fill in the kitchen, you can eat a small amount at the table and all will be fine.
Hope that is what you wanted! From your note I can tell you changed my grandmother’s turkey dressing. How could you? What have you done to it and is it still memorable?
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