Stuffing

Friends don't let friends eat Stove Top. It only takes about fifteen minutes of actual cooking to make great stuffing from scratch as you bustle around preparing the rest of the Thanksgiving meal. For the Cleaver's award-winning* traditional stuffing, you will need bread, butter, chicken or vegetable stock, fresh or dried herbs, roasted chestnuts, dried cherries, onions, celery, fennel, and shiitake mushrooms.

The night before or first thing in the morning, rip up good hearty bread like sourdough, challah, or, as we do, a baguette, and let sit in a big bowl uncovered for at least a few hours to get dried out. As a family unafraid of leftover stuffing, we tend to go with a ratio of one medium-sized loaf for every two adults. Remember that it will shrink as it cooks, and many people love to stuff themselves with stuffing.

Saute chopped onions in butter until they just begin to caramelize, then add in celery, fennel, and shiitake mushrooms and cook until those are soft. Again, you'll want to scale these to be about one medium onion, two stalks of celery, one stalk of fennel, and a handful of shiitakes for each medium-sized loaf of bread. Add salt and pepper to taste and let the mixture cool completely in a bowl before proceeding.

Now rip up plenty of fresh herbs like rosemary, sage, and thyme and add them to the bowl of sauteed vegetables. Dried herbs are fine, just use about half as much of them than you would fresh.

Stir the dried cherries and roasted chestnuts into that mix, and then toss the whole lot of it into your bread bowl and combine. Pour in stock -- chicken if you can, or vegetable if you need the stuffing to be vegetarian-friendly -- a little at time just to make the stuffing moist enough that you can just form a loose ball in your hand.

If you're stuffing the turkey, you should put the stuffing into the fridge as needed to make sure it's the same temperature as the bird itself. You do not want to put warm stuffing into a cold turkey.

Cooked inside the turkey, stuffing needs to reach 165 F to be considered totally safe, so do it up like we tell you over here and no one gets botulism. If you're cooking it in a dish, just be sure to let it cook it at 350 F until it's hot and crusty and you're all set.

*Ok, you got us, we haven't actually won any awards. But people really like this stuffing.

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