The HoloNet Recipe Sharing Thread
Strangely enough, I don't think we've had an official recipe sharing thread before, and if we did, it is most certainly lost to the ages!! Which is why I will revive it with a whole new thread!
Do you have a recipe that you want to pass on, or think that others will enjoy? This is where to post it ^_^
I'll start off with my Cajun Crawfish and Alligator Stuffing. This started as a cornbread stuffing recipe of my mom's, but after being in the South for a rather long time, I have modified it pretty extensively. Now, I understand some folks won't be able to get some of the ingredients I use (like the gator or crawfish), so I'll even include the base recipe for others to tweak in their own fashion :)
Please note! This recipe is very much to taste, so I'll be listing the amounts that I normally use.
Mama Kim's Basic Cornbread Stuffing
Ingredients:
- 1/2 of a large white onion, finely chopped
- 4 stalks of celery, sliced to whatever thickness you want
- 1/2 loaf of bread
- 2 cups self-rising Cornmeal (yellow or white)
- 1/2 cup of AP flour
- 3/4 cup of whole Milk
- 3/4 cups of Buttermilk
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 1/2 cup of rendered bacon fat, 7 tablespoons of melted butter, or 1/2 cup of vegetable oil
- Chicken stock
- Thyme
- Basil
- Oregano
- Parsely
- Sage
Making the cornbread:
- Preheat oven to 450 degrees F
- Mix the cornmeal and the flower, and pour in the milks slowly while stirring.
- While you're doing that, put the bacon fat into a preheated skillet and let it get hot for about 5 minutes or so. If you don't do pork stuff (<3 you, Morg), mix the vegetable oil into the mixture instead. Make sure that if you don't use bacon fat, coat the entire inside of the cast iron with butter so that it doesn't stick.
- Add in the egg and continue to stir until it's consistent and there aren't any flour clumps.
- Pour the cornbread mixture into the cast iron skillet and put into the oven.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. Pull it out, then just turn over the skillet onto a clean cutting board, and the cornbread should fall out. If you do end up with chunks that stick, don't worry; you'll be crumbling it up anyway so it's not a problem at all - just scrape it out into a clean mixing bowl.
Now! While your cornbread is baking, toast up your bread slices, then once that's done break them up into chunks.
In your clean mixing bowl, combine the bread chunks with the cornbread crumbles and give everything a good hand-stirring to mix it up well. If you end up needing two bowls, that's fine; I usually have to do that myself.
Continuing with the hand-mixing, add in your celery and onion, and then the herbs to taste.
With your turkey ready to stuff, cram as much of the stuffing into the body cavity as you can.
Once that's done, grab a casserole dish and put the rest of the stuffing into that. Pour in a good amount of chicken stock, then cover with tin foil and stick it in the fridge. You don't put it in the oven until the last hour of the bird's roast. Once you reach that last hour, go ahead and slide it into the oven. About 15 or so minutes before everything is done, pull it out, remove the foil, then put some little hunks of butter over the top in different places, and slide it back in without the foil.
Technically, what's in the baking dish is more on the dressing side of dishes, but that's fine.
And that's the basic recipe; feel free to modify it however you want!
Cajun Crawfish and Alligator Stuffing
- 1/2 of a large white onion, finely chopped
- 4 stalks of celery, sliced to whatever thickness you want
- 2 cups self-rising Cornmeal (yellow or white)
- 1/2 cup of AP flour
- 3/4 cup of whole Milk
- 3/4 cups of Buttermilk
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 1/2 cup of rendered bacon fat, 7 tablespoons of melted butter, or 1/2 cup of vegetable oil
- Chicken stock
- Thyme
- Cajun seasoning
- 1 pack of precooked crawfish tail meat
- 1 pack of gator tail meat
Cornbread prep is the same, except you have the addition of the Cajun seasoning; so, go ahead and mix that in with your cornmeal and flour.
While the cornbread is cooking, cook up the gator in a non-stick pan with butter, light salt, and pepper. Once it's done, put it on a plastic cutting board and cube it up. Don't worry if you think it's underdone, it still has a round in the oven to make, so that will take care of that!
Get your mixing bowl and crumble in the cornbread, adding in the onions, celery, crawfish meat (with the juice!), and the gator cubes. Note that there isn't any loaf bread in this recipe; this version of the recipe actually benefits from no loaf bread.
Stir in the thyme.
Like before, stuff what you can into the bird, then the rest into a casserole baking dish.
Everything else from that point on is the same as far as cooking :)
And there you have it! I don't have any pictures sadly, but Charley had a good idea for furthering the Cajun theme even more, so when we test kitchen that one, I'll be sure to take pictures of the method and put them up in here.
I have other stuff I want to write out, like my Dip Day monstrosities and eventually my pasta sauce, but I want to see some of everyone else's recipes first!
