Whoo hoo...I am excited to share my "tweaked" news today! You may be familiar with this already but it was new to me and I'm thankful for stumbling across it. I'm talking about making your holiday dressing in the crock-pot, slow cooker, whatever you call yours. I was taking the dressing to daughter #1, Angela's house for Thanksgiving. We were going early so I had concerns about the dressing getting too cold and having to reheat or worse yet, having it dry out. Over space is always a premium commodity and I went looking for alternatives. I've made it in my electric roaster before, so I knew there were options to be had. I researched online and found many people such as myself were asking if crock-pot dressing was do-able. It is!!!!
You simply mix up your dressing of choice and throw it in the crock-pot for 7 hrs or so. I started cooking mine at 6-ish, turned it on high for the last hour we were home (8-9) so it would stay hot while we made the 45 minute - 1 hour drive to her house and then plugged it back in for the rest of the time. No oven space needed, no dried out dressing and all the convenience of having it stay hot while we ate lunch. We had a buffet, no need to even serve it up! What a deal. We will be doing this in the future, I promise!
I tried a new herb/Italian sausage dressing this year. I made the same recipe minus the Italian sausage for our church Thanksgiving lunch and took an empty pan home. Son Kristopher said he thought our Thanksgiving dressing was too spicy, I'm guessing it was the fennel and maybe rosemary he noted. I made homemade Italian sausage for it so it could be tweaked to taste next time. Daughter-in-love Britney said she thought that's what it was, too. I'd never used rosemary in dressing before but I like to try new things so I went for it. Angela liked it, I liked it, didn't take a poll but no one threw it in the trash, so that's a good thing. The big deal for me was learning to cook it in the crock-pot!
Since I was using fresh Italian pan sausage, I cooked it before adding to the mix. I also cooked the onion, garlic, celery. Don't think I need to cook the veggies next time, they had plenty of time to cook. The meat did, too, actually. I cannot state emphatically enough the difference fresh herbs make! Especially the sage.
My mother loved sage dressing. She always made the dressing for family gatherings. She used canned sage...a lot of canned sage. So much canned sage the dressing turned green. I'm not kidding, it was green dressing ...very sag-gie green dressing. For many years after leaving home I would not use sage, I thought it was nasty based on the green dressing experience. I finally ventured in experimenting with it...in TINY doses. Then I discovered fresh sage and a whole new world opened up for me! I never looked back!
I do use ground sage, a TINY bit, to make chicken and dumplings. When I roll out the dumplings they are dusted with it and/or a little poultry seasoning during the rolling process to infuse the herbs into the dumplings themselves. Even if you make cheater dumplings from canned biscuits you can roll them out and do the same thing or dredge them in a herb/flour mixture before adding to the stock. Every layer of taste adds more complexity and interest. You can add chopped fresh sage to the dumpling mixture for a touch of color interest, too!
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving. If you tried new recipes, share, please! I would love to hear about it. Give that crock-pot dressing a try, I think you'll love the ease of it all.
Eat well, eat healthy, be happy!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment