Pass The Dressing, Please

This Thanksgiving we will have dinner at friends’ house. That will be lovely, but Dennis was regretful that we wouldn’t have leftovers, his favorite part of the Thanksgiving tradition. I would miss them, too, especially my favorite parts – dressing and gravy and cranberry sauce. That prompted me to start saving the remnants of our whole wheat bread, leftover biscuits, and cornbread, which are the basis of dressing.

Finally I couldn’t resist any longer. I roasted a turkey breast (two people could never eat a whole turkey) and made dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, and baked squash for last night’s supper.

I make dressing almost exactly the way my mother did. First, she slowly sautéed a considerable amount of chopped onions and celery in butter. These she poured over the broken up breads she had saved, Next she added lots of dried sage and mixed all these together. Finally, she poured in a sufficient amount of turkey broth to moisten the bread cubes, and lightly packed the mixture into a large, shallow baking dish. She never put the dressing inside the bird, but baked it separately.

I’ve changed her "recipe" only to add minced fresh parsley. Yesterday I had no giblets to provide broth, but I found a container of pheasant broth my brother left in our freezer last summer. For the gravy I used chicken broth I’d saved from stewing chicken for salad.

Oh, my, what a tasty supper we had! But, darn it, I forgot to make cranberry sauce.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

A Late Thanksgiving

We are experiencing a prolonged drought. Eastern Kansas is 15 to 19 inches short of rainfall for the year. What’s more, our temperatures are much warmer than normal. Today it’s 69º. Tomorrow, the same.

I haven’t been writing about this because I can’t bear to. Watching Ken Burn’s Dust Bowl documentary, which ran on PBS last week, didn’t improve my outlook one bit. The great Dust Bowl drought lasted ten years. Ours has been only one or two so far, but I saw what could happen.

So I’m not writing about the drought. Instead, Dennis and I are making a late Thanksgiving dinner. We didn’t host the holiday dinner this year, but that meant we didn’t have any leftovers. We always enjoy the leftovers even more than the actual dinner. How nice it is to pull turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce and all the rest out of the refrigerator for a post-holiday meal!

The 11-pound turkey is roasting, cranberry sauce is cooling, a sweet potato is baking and I’ve just mixed the dressing, which is my very favorite part of the meal. I’ve always made dressing just the way my mother did. There’s no recipe; it’s made by instinct and experience.

Today it started with stale whole wheat bread. I keep a plastic bag in the freezer and as homemade bread goes stale I break it in chunks and freeze it. Today I hauled that bag out and dumped the contents into a big mixing bowl.

I also had four biscuits left over from breakfast and crumbled them into the mixing bowl with the stale bread. A few slices of fresh bread, cubed, brought the bread content to an acceptable level.

Next I went to the basement and pulled a couple of onions from the braid that hangs from a nail. The homegrown onions are almost gone, which is fine because they're beginning to sprout. I chopped them, some shallots (which last well into the spring) and celery stalks and leaves, then slowly sautéd them in butter until they were soft.

A generous amount of rubbed sage and parsley fresh from the garden topped off the ingredients.

Finally I added some broth from the giblets and enough chicken broth to moisten all the bread. Now, the dressing is baking in a buttered 9”-square baking dish alongside the turkey. It will be crispy on the top, sides and bottom but still moist in the center. Just right to be topped with gravy.

Aromas have my mouth watering and I can hardly wait to sit down to eat. Drought or no drought, we have a lot to be thankful for, especially with a second Thanksgiving dinner on the table. And if you think there will be a photo of the finished dressing, forget it. I'm ready to eat.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer