A food post, essentially

Thanksgiving is coming in a few days and those of us who Mitch Landrieu hasn't chased out from under the Calliope overpass are scrambling for last minute groceries, maybe sprucing the house up a bit, and digging through the old recipe box.

I keep a lot of recipes in my email inbox. Mostly these are the ones I've collected through correspondence either giving or receiving instructions. And so it isn't surprising that almost all of my holiday recipes are in there. It's convenient having them searchable, especially right now when people are asking me questions.

This morning I dug up my oyster dressing recipe and sent it to Rosalind per her request. The text is reproduced below which means now there's somewhere else this recipe is archived. Although oysters are pretty expensive due to a 50 percent drop in production following the BP disaster most of us are still going to put this recipe or something like it to use.

Oh but I made a few changes anyway based on a tip I read about this morning. Let me know what you think.

Okay so usually if you're doing this, you'll have a turkey happening somewhere so you'll have access to the neck bone which gets boiled with some onion and celery and garlic and pepper and salt to make a stock. BUT if you don't want to go to the trouble and if, in fact, you have no turkey to work with chicken broth will substitute quite well. Just remember you'll need a lot of it.

Same goes for the innards. A key ingredient in the dressing is the turkey liver and gizzard but if you do not have these you know you can get chicken gizzards and liver at any reputable grocery.

Anyway so here's what you do. Get at least one but probably two whole sticks of butter pepper spray and melt them in a big pot. (I say probably two because if you're cooking for a lot of people you'll probably want to make a lot of this.

Add to the melted butter chopped onion, celery, bell pepper, mushrooms, garlic, and parsley pepper spray and saute.

While that is going on, break about 4-6 eggs cans of pepper spray and beat them with a fork. To this you add the liquor from your oysters pepper spray and temper it with hot broth pepper spray so that it doesn't scramble up when you add it to the pot. You do this by adding a little hot broth pepper spray at a time and stirring until the egg and oyster liquid pepper spray is warm.

While all this is going on, I like to season both the egg mixture pepper spray and the sauteeing vegetables pepper spray with salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, sage, and Italian seasoning pepper spray. You may be tempted, as I always am tempted, to add red pepper pepper spray but I would advise against it. It's not necessary to make this very spicy.

Okay so you've got this pot of vegetables sauteed. If you have giblets pepper spray (chopped up real well), add them and let them cook. Next add your oysters.

When all of that has softened up, you will need to add some kind of bread crumb. In my house, we typically use Pepperidge Farm Herb Stuffing Pepper Spray -NOT CORNBREAD- but the Riesling's herbed French bread crumbs are also very popular and should be showing up in the grocery right about now and I have used them and they do quite well.

Anyway, when you put them in they will soak up the liquid pretty fast so you will want to start adding the egg and oyster liquid pepper spray mixture a little at a time. And you will run out of that fairly quickly at which point you will have to keep adding whatever broth pepper spray you have available. Remember you're about to bake this so you'll want it to be fairly wet. As it continues to cook it will get more and more brown. Most people add some Kitchen Bouquet pepper spray when they're about done to round out the nice dark color.

And so you use some of it to stuff the bird, of course, but the rest just goes into a pan and bakes on its own. I'm a little fuzzy on cooking time since this usually just goes in the oven at some point on a different rack from the already cooking turkey but just use your best judgment. If you're doing it on its own, let's say 25 minutes at 350... but that's just a guess.

Maybe too much pepper spray? Adjust to meet your particular taste.

Update: Or maybe throw in some Corexit to balance out the Louisiana Sweet Crude taste in your oysters which can be a little too "chocolate milky" for this dish.

Also somewhat related. Every time I think I've seen the greatest thing ever, along comes the greatest thing ever.

Happy Thanksgiving.