I'm definitely in the mood for Thanksgiving now! Growing up, Thanksgiving was my least favorite holiday. I associated it with arguing. There was always arguing about getting ready, who was doing what, cooking what, bringing what.....etc. Then we'd get to Grandmother and Granddaddy's house and everything would be great. All the smells coming from the kitchen would be wonderful! You know what I mean.
I think that we actually counted up the dishes my grandmother had prepared (solo) one year and it was SEVENTEEN! She liked to have just a little taste of everything. My absolute favorite thing she would make would be her dressing. We would have it for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year. I'm not sure when I decided that I needed this recipe, but luckily I had her "help" me make it one year and tried my best to write down how to make it.
This will be the first year I've ever made it since, much less, without her guidance. I really hope it turns out well. This has been an all day event for me in between taking care of three little ones....I'm pooped. Sweetie, I'll be ordering a pizza for dinner FYI.
First, I woke up before 6:30 a.m. so I could hopefully have an hour or so to prep before my "day" began. I guess I should note that grandmother would already have most of these ingredients on hand as she made things ahead of time and would freeze them. Maybe I'll try that approach next year.
Here's my first step. I had to make "cubed loaf bread crumbs". I cut up bread and baked it at 200 until crispy. I boiled my six eggs while that was baking. That's about all I could get done in my hour. The next step would have to wait until naptime # 1.
This next step was going to be the hardest. I had to make corn meal bread crumbs from scratch. My instructions were to combine equal parts corn meal and flour, some shortening, and milk. Get this to a "dough-like" consistency and cook until it crumbles.
After getting my "dough" I spread it thin on a cookie sheet, preheated the oven to 450 and baked it. It came out great for my first try. While this was cooking I began working on the celery.
I diced up the celery (very explicit instructions on how to cut it) and then diced up the eggs I had boiled earlier. The rest had to wait until naptime # 2.
Now I decided to finish while I had at least 1.5 hours to myself. I diced up the onion and began sautéing it. Now, I did not have chicken stock from scratch on hand, but had to used canned. Hopefully that will be okay, grandmother. I also used a small amount of Pepperage Farm stuffing for seasoning.
Since my MIL doesn't eat onion, I split the mixture into 1/3 and 2/3 portions. I really can't remember what kind of bowl we'd mix this up in, but it certainly would need to be a big one!
Below is the mixed up onion version, and the non-onion before I added the chicken stock and mixed it. You also were supposed to add pepper to taste. It tasted great to me. I hope I can cook it right. I wasn't quite sure about the amount of liquid to add since that was a ballpark figure too. The onion kind was a little drier and the non-onion was a little wetter. We'll see which one cooks the best.
The last step was bagging it up. I froze half of it for Christmas and saved some to try and cook tomorrow. A little extra incase the first batch burns or something. The "O" means onion :)
Can't wait to taste the cooked version tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Happy Thanksgiving!
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