Spicy Sausage Stuffing

I will start by saying that making stuffing really intimidates me. Why you ask? Well...in my family the stuffing is basically everyone's favorite. If you mess up the stuffing everyone will be truly disappointed. This was really just an experiment to see what kind of twist I could do on the traditional stuffing. It surpassed any and all expectations that I had! This stuffing came out *really* good. The only thing that I will need to decide is if it is too spicy for the "average" person. Bryan and I really love a spicy kick to our food, so this was not even close to hot for us, but some may think it is too spicy. I may adjust it to half hot sausage and half regular just in case.

Spicy Sausage Stuffing

• 6 oz Pepperidge Farm Sage & Onion stuffing mix (half a bag)
• 6 oz Pepperidge Farm Cornbread stuffing mix (half a bag)
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 2 celery stalks, diced in small pieces
• 4 oz baby bella mushrooms, roughly chopped
  
• 1 pound hot bulk sausage, browned
• 3 tablespoons butter + more for greasing the casserole dish
  
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 3-4 fresh sage leaves, sliced in thin strips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Brown the sausage in a skillet over medium high heat until no pink remains, about 5-6 minutes. Remove the sausage from the pan and add to a large mixing bowl.

Use the grease leftover from the sausage plus 2 tablespoons of the butter and cook the onions and celery until the celery is starting to soften up, about 4 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and continue to cook about 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and add the onion mixture to the sausage.

Pour the stuffing mix over the top and gently stir to incorporate. Add the 2 cups of chicken stock and fresh sage and stir until the stock is absorbed and stuffing is no longer dry. It should be perfect, but if you feel it is still too dry you can add a little more stock.



Butter your casserole dish and then add the stuffing to the pan. You can either refrigerate for later or bake it now. I decided to refrigerate mine for about 4 hours before I cooked it and it took about 45 minutes to bake it in the oven. If you bake yours right away it should only take about 30 minutes. I kept mine covered the entire baking time to keep the moisture in the stuffing and not let it dry out.


*I did not add any salt to the stuffing because I figured there is already a lot of salt in the stock, but when it was done I did find that I needed a little bit of salt. Taste yours and adjust as necessary.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving everyone!! I am going to try and document some of the craziness that happens over the next few days in my house. Tomorrow I will be doing a lot of prep work for Thursday and baking a few pies. Thursday will be sheer insanity. I will do my best to post Wednesday or Thursday evening :)