lick the screen: sage sausage stuffing!
At dawn, I bolted out of bed. Not from excitement for the food debauchery that would ensue come afternoon, but from a terrible nightmare. This wasn’t your typical frightening fare — ghouls didn’t hover, blood didn’t make an appearance, and I wasn’t flung into the ocean. Rather, I was back in that Valley Stream apartment, fixing Thanksgiving for my friends while my mother sat in her room, door ajar, flipping channels. Her presence was felt, it ghosted, and I remembered clattering pans, sifting through cabinets, hating the fact that she never had anything I needed.
The dinner was abysmal — a failure like the time when I was a teenager and it was my duty to make the dinner while she lay in her bed, comatose. That year the turkey was overdone, it smoked, it’s cavity collapsed inward, and she stomped out of her room, waved the smoke away and sneered. I was devastated. The shakes returned as my dad ushered us out and we spent our Thanksgiving at 7-11.
I have this dreams intermittently, and I’ve learned to breathe through them. And I had quiet meditation before I embarked on today’s miniature feast.
That having been said I got a little adventurous and made my own stuffing! This is wholly unlike me as I prefer to follow an outline, but here’s hoping it’s delicious.
INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 pound of ground sage sausage (casings removed)
1 cup of minced onion
2 cups of diced celery
3 cloves of minced garlic
3 cups of chicken stock
6-7 cups of toasted bread, cut into 1 inch cubes
1 stick of butter
1 egg, beaten
3 tablespoons of olive oil, divided
Salt/pepper to season/taste
DIRECTIONS
Pre-heat your oven to 350F. In a large pan, add two tablespoons of olive oil and brown one pound of the sausage. Remove from the pan and brown the remaining 1/2 pound. Essentially, you want your sausage to sear and slightly caramelize, and if you add to much surface area to the pan, the cooking temperature drops and your sausage starts to boil. Not a pretty party.
Remove sausage, set aside in a large mixing bowl. Melt one stick of butter and add the celery and onions and cook until softened (10-12 minutes). After eight minutes, add in the minced garlic.
When the vegetables are shiny and translucent, add the mixture to the sausage and mix until combined. Add the bread, stock and beaten egg. Toss until combined. Add the stuffing to a buttered 9X13 oven dish. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, remove the aluminum and bake for another 15. Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil once removed from the oven.
Recipe Notes: If you don’t have access to sage sausage, opt for Italian sweet sausage, and add a tablespoon of fresh, chopped sage or a teaspoon of dried. Note that this isn’t like traditional stuffing in consistency. The stuffing is separated, but utterly delicious. To keep warm, leave in oven at 200 degrees, cover. Feel free to add additional stock in the event the stuffing dries out. Enjoy!
