Little Black Apron: Mama's Cornbread Dressing

Every family has their own style of dressing. In the south we take our Thanksgiving day dressing traditions as serious we take our religion. You can't convince someone to believe in anything other than what they were raised on. This holds true for me as well. I've seen tons of new and improved dressing recipes in cooking magazines and cookbooks that involve some pretty enticing ingredients. I'm sure they are all tasty, but I just couldn't bear to tear myself away from my Mama's style.

I've never made dressing on my own until this year. But every Thanksgiving morning until I moved out of my Mom's house I spent helping chop, crumble and prepare our family's dressing. Those are some of the best memories I have cooking with my Mother when I was young. So when the task fell upon me to cook my own this year I knew the method so well I could have done it in my sleep. I had years of preparation for that very day, when I could carry on my Mother's tradition in my own home. Thank goodness, my Mother is doing our Thanksgiving Day meal this year because no matter how much you try and do it just the same as she did, yours is never as good as your Mothers.

Even though I'm sure you have your own coveted family recipe, I thought I would share our method with you. We do the traditional southern style cornbread dressing, but add in a couple of biscuits also. If I remember correctly we started adding biscuits into the dressing because we ran out of cornmeal on Thanksgiving Day. We weren't able to make enough cornbread for the entire family so my Mom improvised by adding in biscuits. We must have liked it better cause it stuck.

When I was young we used the turkey drippings as the broth for the dressing. Thank heavens chicken broth has come a long way over the years and I've talked Mom into using that instead. For two reasons: 1. I thought the turkey drippings were gross. 2. We could make the dressing in advance and not have to sit around waiting to pour the junk off the cooked bird.

My husband thought I needed a picture of me preparing this dish for my blog.
I thought I should have done my hair/make-up better that day if he wanted to do an impromptu photo shoot of me. ~sigh~

My Mama's Dressing

Ingredients:

1 pan of prepared cornbread (cooked in cast iron skillet is best)

6 Grands Buttermilk Biscuits, cooked

4 or 5 celery stalks, chopped

1/2 medium white onion, finely chopped

5-6 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped

About 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning (more or less depending on your taste)

1 teaspoon dried sage

Salt and Pepper to taste

1 32 oz carton reduced sodium chicken broth

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Crumble cornbread and biscuits into a 9x13 casserole dish. Add in chopped celery, onion and fresh sage.

Stir in poultry seasoning, dried sage, and about a teaspoon of salt / pinch of pepper. Mix together to get the seasonings well distributed.

Level out the dressing across the pan and slowly pour the chicken stock over the bread. Making sure to cover the entire surface of the dressing, you want to soak the bread well. Use the back of spatula if needed to press the bread down into the broth.

At this point you HAVE to taste the dressing. I know, its not cooked yet. But if the dressing isn't good at this point, it won't be good later either. You are tasting to see if you need to add in additional salt, pepper, poultry seasoning or sage. Add in any seasonings you feel like it's lacking.

The most important thing to make sure your dressing doesn't turn out dry is that it's super moist before going into the oven. I like to be able to see a pool of broth around the sides of the pan. As it cooks it will continue to soak the extra broth, keeping the dish moist. I used the whole carton of broth, plus bought 1 extra can to have on standby, just in case it started to look dry in the oven during baking. You can pour additional broth in if needed.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until top starts to brown slightly.

Don't overcook! Remember: Baking too long = dry stuffing