How to Make Thanksgiving Dinner Stuffing for Chicken or Turkey | Pottery Barn

Pottery Barn Party Planner: Thanksgiving Dinner Spicy Stuffing
Hi I'm Karen Bates from the Apple Farm in Mendocino County up in Northern California.
It's the end of our harvest season and we're gathered here in our big kitchen to make Thanksgiving dinner.
My brother Johnny is here from the Booneville Hotel which is down the road,
he also has a big kitchen. We're kind of long on kitchens in our family.
But we do like to gather and cook together, especially on holidays, as often as we can.
Right now we're gonna work on the stuffing for our turkey, and I think I'm gonna tear the bread, and Johnny's
gonna work on the aromatics. So the first thing I'm gonna do is to take a couple of these
chilis, these are Guajillo chilis, and rinse them and put them in kind of a low oven for about five minutes to toast
because Johnny and I both agree that we like a little spice in our dressing.
This will give us a little color and flavor, and a little edge of spiciness without making it too hot.
Our chilis were in the oven for about five minutes and they're really crisp, which is nice, this is what we're looking for,
if they're black they can be bitter, which we don't want. So sometimes they have a lot of seeds in them,
and you want to get rid of the seeds for this, and just break the chili up into pieces and soak it
in water, for fifteen or twenty minutes will make it real soft.
We're gonna start by cutting the onions, and our family has a tradition of
cutting things versus chopping things. And what we're gonna do is cut it on the bius
and we're gonna cut it versus chop it so I'm gonna cut in towards the center,
and then I turn it around, and this way you end up with a nice dice,
with uh, and you want a decent size here, you don't want tiny tiny little pieces,
we're gonna cut the celery here for the stuffing and we want the same size pieces as we had with the onion.
Keep your fingers out of the mix there by curling them under always helps.
So the last bits here of the celery, just got a lot of stem and leaf on it,
and we're gonna save that and put it in the stock pot,
which we've got over here, and we've got turkey necks and giblets and so forth in there,
for the gravy. We're gonna do a little bit of garlic, go with that too, probably one clove of garlic.
Now it's the same thing, I'm gonna sliver this, and I'm gonna take that and stack that and sliver it again.
Take that half right there and I'm gonna turn and just chop that of the end,
so you end up with a little mince of garlic,
so we're gonna take a whole orange, we're gonna turn it around and shave off some nice pieces.
We want the peel, the rind and peel as much as anything else.
So our chili has been soaking and as you can see we've got this beautiful mahogany colored water here,
I love the color that you get out of the chilis, now we do have this little bit of soaking water,
I hate to throw this away. Sometimes people say it's bitter, um, and don't like to use it in things, but
I don't mind a little bitter flavor and the way you find out if something is bitter or not is to taste it
and see, and for me it's not bitter at all.
So I'm just gonna add it into our stock pot, because that's gonna give us some beautiful color on our gravy.
We're gonna put some butter in the pan here which I've got pretty hot, we're gonna use quite a lot of butter,
my mom always said that, you know, the dressing, the stuffing, the only fat that's in there is the butter,
but we're gonna use half a cube here, we're gonna add the onions first,
the onions have a little bit of garlic in them.
we're just sweating the vegetables and starting to get them warmed up and release their flavor,
and then incorporate all these flavors, we're also gonna season this, it's very important,
I'm gonna start shaking the pan or however the best way for you.
Want to mix those up, we're gonna add the chili that Karen has
first soaked, toasted, soaked and then chopped, and that'll start to
get a wonderful color out of that. At this point, obviously, the best thing,
it's a good time to start seasoning it. We're gonna season it here, I'm gonna start with,
we don't measure salt, obviously, we use, um, a coarse salt that you can really feel,
we're about up to temp, we're gonna add our orange.
We've got this all ready to go, we're gonna move back to the center island with Karen,
and, um, we're gonna incorporate this with the bread, and a few other ingredients.
So all we need to do here is incorporate the bread into the aromatics, we're gonna put a little, uh,
fresh oregano, and we think a little green from Italian parsley would be really nice in this.
It's really nice to incorporate herbs wherever you can. Let's just toss some of the bread in here,
this is probably pretty hot, so I'm just gonna mix in a little bit at a time,
I kind of like to use my hands to do it, but I think it might be a little too hot for that.
We're gonna put the oregano in here, just scatter it in.
and the rest of our bread, and then we've used a shallow pan here because
that's gonna give us a lot of surface area, we want this to get kind of brown and crusty on the top.
Oh, we were gonna dab a little butter on top, Johnny why don't you do that, you have clean hands.
That looks great, that'll make it kind of nice and crusty and Johnny, go ahead and put it in the oven.
I have the oven at 400 degrees, because the point of this is to get it hot and kind of crusty on top.
Happy Thanksgiving from the Apple Farm to your homes.
Spicy Stuffing for Turkey or Chicken Cut into small dice: 1 Large onion Several Stalks of Celery Toast then Soak then Pree: 1 or 2 Guajillo Chiles (or similar) In a Saute Pan Cook Onion and Celery in 1/2 Cup Butter & the Chile Puree.
Have ready: About 6 cups torn bread, crusts removed. Toss bread with celery onion mix. Season generously with salt. Fresh ground black pepper and either fresh or dried oregano. Stuff bird and roast immediately or cook stuffing separately.
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