It’s Cornbread Dressing Time, Turkeys
Listen up.
We are a little more than a week away from Thanksgiving, and my basic message to you is simple: don’t foul this up. There are so many ways Thanksgiving can go wrong. (I am looking at you, Tony Romo.) You can suffer through unlimited kinds of grief with turkey preparation. You can have lumps in your gravy. You can (God forbid) run out of pie, and that would be so very sad. But there are two things that you absolutely can’t mess up, because if you do, it would ruin everything forever.
The first is simple. Don’t forget the cranberry sauce. Open a jar and put it out and then eat it. I am not even going to be unhappy with you (yes, you, not Tony Romo you but you personally reading this while you should be, you know, working and stuff) if you get the plain cranberry sauce and not the superior whole-berry version, because both are very good in their own way. Having said that, get the whole-berry stuff next time. What is wrong with you? (You here means both you, personally, and Tony Romo.)
The second is the cornbread dressing, and yes, I said CORNBREAD and yes, I said DRESSING. I am not going to argue with you about this. I have spent entirely too much time lately arguing with friends who have the completely wrong and utterly foolish idea that you can put beans in chili and still call it authentic Texas chili, which you cannot do. You can argue about stuff like that if you want, although it is a waste of time and you will still be wrong. But there’s not a word in the English language that conveys the concept of just how unthinkably, tragically wrong it is to eat anything other than cornbread dressing at Thanksgiving. And, yes. It HAS to be CORNBREAD, and it HAS to be DRESSING, and for God’s sake, just listen for a minute while I tell you how to make it and then you will make it and you will understand why it’s so important.
First, the cornbread. Make cornbread. Two loaves, minimum. Get the Jiffy cornbread muffin mix and follow the directions–that’s two boxes per loaf, ideally, unless you have a giant loaf pan, which you probably don’t. So get four boxes–five if you have small children who will eat cornbread but won’t eat dressing. (If you don’t have a loaf pan you can pick up aluminum ones at the store for cheap.) You are going to make your cornbread at least a day before you actually make the dressing, so you won’t be pressed for time later. Got it? Good.
On the day of the feast, take one large onion (Vidalia by preference, but whatever you like is fine) and chop it into bits. Do the same for two stalks of celery. Throw it all into a non-stick pan with, say, half a stick of butter and cook until the vegetables are as done as you would like them to be. While that’s cooking, chop up two pounds of sausage. In an ideal, perfect world, you’d be using Elgin sausage, but you would not go too far wrong using just ordinary kielbasa. If you can get a sage or garlic flavor in your sausage, that’s a nice bonus. If you can grill your sausage, do that, but if you can’t due to weather concerns, just pan-fry it up in your cast-iron skillet until you get a nice little brown crispness to it. Okay? Got it? Good.
Put your cornbread into the vessel of your choice. This can be a shallow aluminum roasting pan, and probably should be, but maybe you don’t have one of those and are too proud to go around the neighborhood offering to rake leaves for a dollar in order to be able to afford one. Pick something that will go into the oven and withstand high heat. If you’re using something you’re going to wash later, then spray the inside of the vessel with Pam before you put anything in there, just in case. Smash up your cornbread or get a small child to do it for you. You want to break the cornbread down to small chunks but not all the way down to crumbs, and you want to spread the crustier bits throughout.
Then take the contents of the veggie pan (with all the butter, yes) and the contents of the sausage pan (with all the rendered fat, yes) and empty them into the cornbread. Use a wooden spoon to stir everything around until the contents are evenly distributed. It will look horrible for a little while, but that’s all right. Don’t worry. Relax. You’re almost done.
What you want to do next is add in sage. If you have fresh sage, and want to pretend that you’re being healthy somehow, that’s cool. I can dig it. I use the dry stuff because I have no such pretenses. Sprinkle the sage liberally over and into the cornbread glop. You can add other seasoning if you want–garlic powder is fine, other herbs like basil and thyme are probably okay, put some salt and pepper in there if you want–but the sage is mandatory.
For the last stage, pour half a cup of chicken stock into the mix and stir. What you are going for, here, is a nice sort of pudding-like consistency. Work the stock into the mixture until everything is nice and moist. If it isn’t moist enough (it probably isn’t), add in more, a little at a time, until everything is nice and wet without being too runny. If you want something a little more custard-y, add in a couple of eggs.
Then put the completed dressing in your oven, at 350 degrees, until the top is all nice and crispy and delicious. Take it out. ENJOY.
You will notice two steps I have not mentioned. First, I never once told you, or anybody, to put the dressing inside the carcass of a turkey, which would make it “stuffing.” THIS IS NOT STUFFING. THIS IS DRESSING. KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.
Second, you will, sometimes, find cornbread dressing recipes that call for the inclusion of white bread. The Paula Deen recipe calls for adding in saltine crackers. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. White bread is not going to add any flavor to your dressing. White bread is not going to add any useful texture to your dressing. It is just filler. If you need to make more dressing, then make more cornbread. It isn’t hard.
The holidays are difficult times, especially if you have multiple small children who won’t eat turkey or dressing or even cranberry sauce, and are perfectly happy with chicken patties and bowtie noodles for every meal God sends. Don’t make it hard on yourself. Make cornbread dressing and eat as much of it as you can without actually throwing up after the inevitable Tony Romo interception. My God, does he not understand that there’s another team out there in different uniforms?
