We doubled this recipe and ended up swimming in stuffing on Thanksgiving. Yay, leftovers. This recipe—a Meatloafing original—has a lot of warm, comforting flavors and some nice textural highlights. Tip: Construct a celery partition to keep meat and veg stuffings separate (see photo above).

Ingredients

• 1 loaf rustic white bread, cubed, with crusts intact (1-1 1/4 pounds)
• 2 or so cups chicken stock (homemade if possible)
• 1 carrot, cut into several large pieces
• 2 stalks celery, cut into several large pieces
• 1 medium onion, chopped into small pieces
• 1/2 can sliced water chestnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1/2 cup walnuts
• 1/2 cup half & half
• 1 teaspooon (more? add this to taste) poultry seasoning
• Black pepper
• Butter
• canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1 roll pork breakfast sausage or 8-10 oz cremini mushrooms, roughly sliced (or use both, but halve the amounts)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375°. Toast the nuts in oven or in cast-iron skillet and set aside.
2. In a food processor, pulse carrot and celery until it’s a coarse pulp. Saute the pulp with onion and 4 T butter plus a little oil (so the butter doesn’t burn) in stockpot until onions are soft and the moisture has cooked off - 10-15 minutes.
3. Saute mushrooms or pork in butter or oil in hot cast-iron skillet. The pan should be hot enough that the mushrooms get a little crispy and have nice colour. If you’re using pork, you don’t need any extra oil, but fry the pork until you have some nice crispy nuggets.
4. In the stockpot with the sauteed onion/carrot/celery, mixture, add the mushrooms/pork, water chestnuts, bread cubes, and salt & pepper to taste.
5. In small mixing bowl, combine chicken stock, half & half, and egg. Fold into bread mixture. Add extra chicken stock if necessary. Everything should be really moist.
6. Pour into buttered 13×9-inch pan and bake until hot and golden on top, or about 35 minutes.

This is what the celery-carrot-onion mixture should look like after sauteeing.

And the stuffing, deconstructed. It’s like a giant stuffing bibimbap.

Thanks to Charlotte for the stuffing tips!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 6:51 pm and is filed under food, recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.