Cranberry and Sausage Cornbread Stuffing

Recipe Review: An update on traditional stuffing that still has all the classic flavors.

How come we only eat stuffing on Thanksgiving?? Stuffing is amazing and I really believe that we should eat it year round. I'm a stickler for traditional Thanksgiving food and don't often like to branch out. We made sure to have classic stuffing as well, so I was free to branch out with this Cranberry and Sausage Cornbread stuffing. This is a doctored up version that starts with Trader Joe's Cornbread stuffing mix as a base. 

Cranberry and Sausage Cornbread Stuffing

from traderjoes.com

serves 8-10

1 cup dried cranberries

3 cups turkey or chicken broth

1 package Italian sausage (5 links)

1 stick butter

1 cup diced onion

1 cup diced celery

1 box Trader Joe's cornbread Stuffing Mix

Black Pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine cranberries with one cup of broth and set aside. In a large skillet crumble and saute sausage over moderate heat until cooked through (be sure to remove any casing).  Move sausage into a large bowl and set aside. Add butter to skillet and melt. Use butter to scrape up any brown sites of sausage. Add celery and onions and saute until soft, about 10 to 15 minutes. Place bread cubes from stuffing mix in bowl with sausage. Add cooked veggies to bowl; add broth with cranberries and mix well. Add additional broth, one up at a time and continue to mix until all bread is moist. Season with pepper. Add contents of seasoning packet, (to taste) and mix until well combined. Place in a casserole dish and bake for 25 to 45 minutes. 

I got lots of positive feedback from this stuffing. I'm thinking of making it again for Christmas. I can't believe that its only 2 weeks away. I know I haven't posted in a while, every since thanksgiving things have been incredibly busy. I was lucky enough to pick up some hours at my old job, add that to the million social obligations that pop up between Thanksgiving and Christmas and I've barely had time to cook anything. In lieu of making food I've been doing a ton of crafts and Christmas decorating to get the house looking spirited. (Kevin is pretty pissed at me because there is glitter everywhere!) I think the house is sufficiently decorated for me to start cooking- hopefully I'll have some more yummy stuff up here soon!

Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes

Recipe Review- If you like pumpkin this is the cupcake for you.

Optional game: Take a drink for every time I say "Pumpkin" in this post. (Disclaimer: you really probably shouldn't do this. Drinking that much would be hazardous to the safety of any baked goods. Do not operate an oven while under the influence of alcohol)

Oh yea its pumpkin time. I literally just can't get enough of everything pumpkin so it wasn't good enough to make just pumpkin cupcakes- I made pumpkin cupcakes, with pumpkin pie filling, and pumpkin cream cheese frosting. That's a whole lotta pumpkin- and that's the way I like it.

I already knew I would be making pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin frosting (super easy, you just sub some canned pumpkin for some of the wet ingredients in your recipes. I will share mine at the end of the post) but gee that just wasn't enough. I briefly debated filling them with pumpkin mousse since I had good results from the chocolate mousse filled cupcakes that I made the week before. I don't know that just didn't seem special enough. I took a page from cupcakeproject.com who used pumpkin pie filling as frosting, but instead I used it to fill the cupcakes. I had limited time to make these so I used a store bought pie and scooped the filling out. A quick turn in the mixer and my pumpkin pie filling was ready!

Pumpkin Cupcakes
adapted from "I like You: Hospitality Under the Influence" by Amy Sedaris 
yield: 24 cupcakes

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup pumpkin

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease or line a cupcake pan with paper liners.

In a large bowl cream together butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add vanilla, salt, and baking powder. Add flour in three batches, alternating with the milk. Add pumpkin and mix until batter is smooth with no lumps, but do not over beat. 

Divide batter evenly among cups, and bake for 18- 20 minutes or until tops are just golden and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool on rack to room temperature before frosting.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting
from: cupcakeproject.com
yield: frosts 24 cupcakes and then some

8oz cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup pumpkin
1 tsp vanilla
6 cups powdered sugar

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in pumpkin and vanilla.

Mix in powdered sugar a little at a time, gradually increasing speed until desired consistency is reached.

printable recipe 

I brought these to a pumpkin carving party that a friend hosted and they were quickly gobbled up! We carved pumpkins and then toasted the seeds and ate all sorts of pumpkin treats. Here are our jack-o-lanterns!

Happy Halloween Everyone!


PS-Just in case you were playing- you should have drank 22 times. I hope you weren't doing shots. 

Chocolate Pecan Pie

Recipe Review: Great Twist on traditional Pecan Pie, filling is simple and easy to make, attempt pie crust at your own risk.

Typically my sister is the baker of the family. Sure I can whip up some great Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I'm a master of the boxed cake mix (Funfetti anyone??) but she is great at making baked goods from scratch. While its not my forte, over the past few years I have cautiously been dabbling in making pies, and have gotten pretty competent at it. At first glance a pie crust recipe looks really easy. Only 4 ingredients go into it, flour, fat, salt and water, but the techniques that go into combining these elements are essential to creating a light flaky pie crust. There's lots of debate between butter and shortening crusts- shortening makes a flakier crust, but butter makes a more flavorful crust. I do a mix of half of each, but there is also butter flavored Crisco out there which would be a good option as well.

Roasted Vegetables & Pineapple Stuffing

I like vegetables. Lots. Yummmm. Thanksgiving dishes tend to be pretty carb-y and starchy so I wanted to make sure we had some veggies to munch on too. Also I could do all my prep ahead of time, which was very essential this thanksgiving. I doubled this and made this for both of the thanksgiving's that I attended so I got two times to try different spices to come up with the right combo to blog about!

I knew I wanted to use butternut squash and Brussels sprouts as my base vegetables, and decided to throw in baby carrots, onions, cauliflower, and parsnips. (Mostly I just wanted to be fancy and say that I used parsnips in a recipe) What exactly is a parsnip? Wikipedia tells us that:

The parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is a root vegetable related to the carrot. Parsnips resemble carrots, but are paler than most carrots and have a sweeter flavor, especially when cooked.

(I may allegedly be including this because when I was at the grocery store I thought I was purchasing turnips but they turned out to be parsnips)

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Recipe Review: Tried and True best Pumpkin Cheesecake you will ever eat. Go make this right now.

For the past few years I've been making pumpkin cheesecake for Halloween/Thanksgiving. (Basically I'll make a pumpkin recipe whenever I can get away with it. I hate how society forces us to only eat pumpkin in the fall. I've been stockpiling canned pumpkin this year so I can use it whenever. Take that seasons!) In general everyone loves cheesecake, and whenever it gets cut into and people realize that its a pumpkin cheesecake, they flip. Its actually pretty easy to make, and can be made up to a week in advance.



mine looked just like this- minus the pecans on top- I swear, I was just in a hurry and didn't get to take pictures


The recipe that I use is from Joy of Baking its very detailed and walks you though all the steps along the way. (The degree of details might make it look a little overwhelming at first, but trust me its not)

Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes

Quick Recipe Review: Easy to make, melt in your mouth decadent sweet potatoes with kick (kick provided by Jack Daniels) 

I'm still recovering from thanksgiving, and I have a whole lot of recipes to type up here. I'm going to try to make the effort to get them all posted this week, unfortunately I don't have photos for each dish, but I'll post what I've got. Starting off with Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes.

Kevin had been subtly hinting saying that he wanted to have sweet potatoes for a few days before Thanksgiving. Each time I would say "Well should we make them?" "No no, we've got enough stuff to make already" The last straw was when we went to the grocery store Thanksgiving morning and there were some sweet potatoes improperly labeled as yam's and on sale for 50 cents a pound. (Check out this post for sweet potato/yam identity theft information) As soon as we got home and started cooking, Kevin mentioned the sweet potatoes and how good they were, again.