Home chef Melinda Barnett offers up a twist on her grandmother’s Thanksgiving dressing recipe. Photo furnished
Melinda Barnett was the winner of this year’s “Home Chef” competition at Smiley Pete’s Crave Food + Music Festival. We know Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday, so we invited her to submit a favorite Thanksgiving recipe.
After my grandmother passed away, my mother asked me to make the Thanksgiving dressing. It was a rite of passage for me. Using my grandmother’s cornbread dressing as a starting point, I made it my own by adding homemade sourdough, chicken stock and an abundance of sage from my herb garden. This dish smells and tastes like the holidays!
Yields one 9”x 13” casserole dish.
Photo furnished
Ingredients:
• 1 batch of cornbread
• 1/2 loaf of sourdough bread, cubed
• 1 medium onion, diced (about 1 cup)
• 1/2 bunch of celery, diced (about 1 cup)
• 1 Honeycrisp apple, finely diced
• 1 quart of chicken stock
• 1 pound of sage sausage (optional)
• 1 bunch of fresh sage, finely sliced
• Dried sage to taste (I use a lot)
• 1 egg
• Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Crumble the cornbread into a large pan and toss it with diced sourdough. Set aside.
Crumble and cook the sausage until done, then remove it from the pan and set it aside.
Add diced celery, apple and onion to the pan and cook until the onions are transparent.
Remove the vegetables from the pan with a slotted spoon and add them to the sausage.
Stir this mixture into the bread. Add dried sage, fresh sage, salt and pepper and mix well.
Meanwhile, mix 1 egg with the stock and pour it over the bread mixture. Mix all ingredients well and pat down evenly into the pan.
Cover the pan and bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 10 minutes until lightly browned on top.
Notes:
I prepare the cornbread according to the instructions on the back of the Martha White Cornmeal Bag, replacing half of the cornmeal with self-rising flour and adding a generous amount of fresh ground sage. I also make my sourdough bread, but store-bought is fine; you can purchase fresh sourdough loaves in most grocery store delis. If you’re able to make your own chicken stock, it will yield a much richer flavor too!