ROUSES_Holiday2018Magazine-FINAL.indd

Stuffing and dressing are not different names for the same thing although the names are often used interchangeably. In short — and this is a good way to start a fight at theThanksgiving table that doesn’t involve politics—you don’t need a turkey to make a dressing, but you definitely need one to make a stuff- ing (or at least some sort of animal that has been hollowed out and stuffed with food). Dressing shoved inside of a turkey is stuffing. Stuffing prepared in separate bakeware is dressing.And that’s it! Anyone who argues with this is wrong. It is the vessel of preparation that makes all the difference. “I personally do a cornbread, smoked sausage and tasso dressing for the holidays,” says Marc Ardoin, corporate chef for Rouses Markets. “Part of it involves rendering down the smoked sausage and the tasso, and caramelizing the onions.” You won’t likely see that kind of edible magic in a stuffing.Moreover, a dressing prepared in the oven gets a nice brown crust whose corner pieces cause fights among family members for the last bit of it. It can be prepared much faster, and if you need to bring a dish to dinner, it’s a good one to choose when someone else has claimed rolls. It would seem an open-and-shut case for dressings, then. (Cornbread, smoked sausage and tasso? I mean, what could possibly compete?) But then you talk about what turkeys do to stuffings, and, suddenly, you’re faced with a dilemma. You stuff your bread-seasoning-celery-onion mélange inside of the bird, and as it roasts for hours in the oven, it is imbued with the rich flavor of poultry juices as they drip down through the turkey right into the stuffing. (Note: A stuffing needs to reach 165 degrees to be sure that no raw turkey blood survives the roasting process.) Good luck getting your Pampered Chef stoneware to imbue turkey juice. So what is a Thanksgiving cook to do? I asked Marc his preference — he is the chef, after all — and he confessed to preferring regular dressings. “I like that nice crunchy bit around the outside,” he said. Some of the best sausage in the South is made at Alabama’s Conecuh Sausage Company. The family-owned company has been operating in the small town of Evergreen since 1947.

SMOKED SAUSAGE & TASSO CORNBREAD DRESSING

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

2 tablespoons canola oil 1 pound smoked sausage, diced ½ pound tasso, cubed 4 tablespoons unsalted butter 4 cups onion, diced 2 cups celery, diced 2 cups green bell pepper, diced 2 tablespoons garlic, minced

1 tablespoon Paul Prudhomme Poultry Magic 1 bunch green onions, chopped ½ bunch parsley , chopped 2 tablespoons sage , chopped 1 quart chicken stock 2 pounds prepared cornbread (bought from Rouses Bakery) cut into cubes

HOW TO PREP 1 Heat the canola oil in a large pan over medium-high heat, and cook the smoked sausage to render the fat, around 5 minutes. 2 Add the tasso and cook for an additional 2 minutes 3 Remove the sausage and tasso from the pan, reserv- ing the fat. Place the cooked meat on a plate lined with a paper towel to absorb the excess grease. 4 Add the butter to the reserved fat from the sausage and tasso into the pan; heat until melted. 5 Add the onion, celery and bell pepper to the butter and reserved fat mixture in the pan, and cook over medium heat. 6 Scrape the bottom of the pan with your spoon to release the fond from the bottom of the pan. This will help give a little more color to the vegetables. (You can add a little of the chicken stock to the pan if necessary to help loosen the stubborn bits.) 7 After the vegetables have cooked down and caramel- ized, add the garlic and Poultry Magic to the pan, and cook for an additional 2 minutes. 8 Combine the cubed cornbread, tasso and smoked sausage, cooked vegetables, green onion, parsley and sage in a mixing bowl. Toss until completely mixed. 9 Transfer the dressing mix to a 9x13 pan, and pour the chicken stock over the mixture. 10 Preheat the oven to 400°F, and bake the dressing for 45 minutes until a golden brown crust forms on the top. 11 Remove from the oven and set aside for 10 minutes before serving.

19 everyday NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018