See my Bagel Stuffing in this thread from 2002, make it every year.

It works both in and out of the bird

It's always a huge hit.


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/omni/...pe-thread.html

Our favourite stuffing is a standard Paxo Sage and Onion carton mixed with two pork and red onions sausages.

Perfect!

You mean adding anything other than salt and pepper?

It's true I like powerful tastes, but everyone who has tried my stuffing raves about it.

Stuffing without sage = no good.
Stuffing with sweet things like apples or raisins = no good.
Adding sausage, giblets, etc = no problem.

Yes. I've tried adding sage, I've tried using pre-seasoned stuffing mix, and get lots of comments about how it has an overpowering taste.

Will likely use ciabatta bread, sweet Italian sausage, mushrooms, chicken stock, butter, onion, celery, fresh sage and fresh thyme.

Ha ha! I called my mother out on 'Paxo' when she blasted me for using ready made stuffing. She claims to always make stuffing from scratch but I have distinct memories of pouring hot water on to Paxo (or whichever brand it was) and forming balls before Sunday lunch! I quite like it as a quick fix but prefer made from scratch if I am not in a mad panic / rush!

We buy Mrs. Cubison's box of seasoned dressing and add tons of stuff to it to make (IMO) the best stuffing ever.

We sautee onions and celery in butter and add that to the bread cubes with canned (diced) pineapple, dried cranberries, diced granny smith apples, and the meat from the turkey neck (and other scraps) that was boiled earlier in water. Add that homemade turkey broth till sufficiently moist, taste and season if necessary, and stuff in the turkey and/or bake in a pan until brown on top.

Smother with gravy at the table and get ready for absolute stuffing heaven.

Couple of big loafs of sandwich bread, just tear it apart with your hands into a BIG bowl. Chop up some onion and celery, and cook them in some butter (year, it takes alot of it) until nice and tender. also warm up some chicken broth.
To your bread, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of that poultry seasoning that comes in a box. Pour the butter and vegetables in, and a little bi of the broth, and start mixing it together with your hands. How much you knead the stuff together determines the density - only lightly mix it if you want fluffy, pasty stuffing, knead it a lot if you want dense filling stuffing (my preference). Add more broth as needed to make a good consistency, taste to adjust for seasoning, salt and pepper.

when you cook it, put a little of the broth in the bottom of the pan to create steam and keep it moist.

I consider myself a good cook, however my mother makes stuffing that to this day baffeles me. I know there are the usual culprits are involved, but I have never figured it out. She cooks some inside the turkey, but mine is cooked separately, I like mine on the extremely dry/burnt side. Makes me sad that i'll miss Thanksgiving this year

I have a different variation each year. Last year was black olives, sundried tomatoes, roasted sweet onions and fresh rosemary with some sort of cubed bread. Gravy was a peppercorn shiraz reduction with turkey drippings, diced sundried tomatoes and a bit of the black olives ground into a tapenade to balance it all out.

This year I'm fancying some sort of multi-layered porchetta stuffing, but that may just turn into a turducken-type nightmare. It all depends on what I end up having time for (& what's on sale) the week before. I'm kind of a last minute cook in the kitchen and tend to stress everyone out because no one really knows what's coming out of the kitchen.

My mother made the best stuffing ever. I crave it sometimes. But she has cancer and no longer cooks - this year we might not even be able to enjoy a real family dinner. For the first time in my memory I am dreading the holidays. I just cant imagine it without her or her turkey and stuffing.

I think Turkey and stuffing is just one of those things you can't fancy up. It fills the soul, and the simpler it is, the better a job at that it does.

Sorry to hear that. Why not ask her for her recipes and such, and celebrate the holidays early, with you or someone else in the family doing the cooking?

Spend as much time as you can with her and ask her for her stories on cooking for the holidays and for her recipes. She'll be with you for every thanksgiving when you recreate her recipes

I do different Turkey and stuffing every year because we celebrate both Canadian (Oct) and American (Nov) Thanksgiving. Plus, the MIL is really insecure and competitive (not a good combination) and does turkey one way and one way only So when I make turkey I always do something very different that she can label as blasphemous . Plus, sometimes we have turkey at x'mas too and that's turkey 3 months in a row....

One of my more traditional recipes is a sweet Italian sausage stuffing with fennel and orange with fresh cranberries. Gravy is sweet onion riesling reduction. It's still considered weird for the MIL but it's a situation that works for us I think the last time I made a "traditional" turkey was our first thanksgiving together that I cooked and the MIL had some sort of fit.

First Christmas I hosted was like the thanksgiving episode from Friends! Each person has their ideas about what is essential for Christmas to be proper, and I was juggling stuffing (inside and outside of turkey), gravy, bread sauce, yorkshire puddings, mashed and roasted potatoes, 4 different stove cooked vegetables, roasted parsnips,cranberry sauce, etc etc. I was so busy making sure everyone had what they wanted, that as I sat down at the table I realized I had completely and utterly forgotten to make any food for myself (I am veggie, and normally do something different for me - I had planned and had the ingredients for a quiche that year but just never made it!)

Have to say, my best Thanksgiving:

My brother had moved out to Colorado, and about two weeks before thanksgiving, he was in a very bad winter hiking accident. My parents and I flew out there, as he was hanging on by a thread the first few days. Anyways, he got better, and was quite able to eat even though he was stuck in the hospital still by the time Thanksgiving rolled around.

So, knowing that this was something pretty important to him and us, we ended up trying to cook a full thanksgiving dinner in a Townplace Suite. Cooking the vegetables was a bit complicated - as we only had two burners and a couple of pans, but we managed that just fine. The Turkey, however, proved far more difficult - it was just to big for the little oven they had, and we kept setting off the smoke alarm. So there we were with an turkey we couldn't cook.

Well, my mother was a smoker back then, and during her cigarette breaks at the hospital was talking with some of the kitchen staff. She happened to be up there when I called her about the dilemma - and she talked to her friends - and they offered to take the turkey and cook it for us!

In the end, we had a great little meal. We invited soe of the nurses to come in and join us, he had another friend he had met out there come up too, and we had one of the best meals ever served in a hospital!