Cornbread Dressing

I made a double batch of cornbread dressing on Saturday.

The way it started was I was going to the grocery store. On the way I decided to add a roasted chicken to my very organized Excel spreadsheet list. (Mentally added it, I was driving.) Realizing that we usually finish only half of the chicken (unless I think to ask one of the girls if they want half of it,) I decided I would take half of it to Dee and Gary who had just gotten home from more than a month in the hospital. Once I decided that, I thought, "Ooh, I should make some dressing to go with the chicken." So, at the store I remembered to add all the items I needed to carry out my plan.

At home I made a double recipe of Egg Bread. This is the cornbread my mother always used for her dressing recipe. As a special treat when I was a kid, my mom would make this Egg Bread and then cook some Little Smokie sausages. She baked the egg bread in a jelly roll pan, I think, which made it turn out not so high...about an inch or so. The batter was fairly thin and the top would get nice and crusty from the 2 cups of buttermilk, an egg and the shortening in the mix. A square of that, spread with margarine and then stuffed with a little smokie or two...omigosh! I can taste it now! I'll put the recipe in here somewhere.

I wanted to use my new Cuisinart food processor that I had purchased a few days earlier. Of course, that meant I had to remove it from the box and packing, figure out how to take it apart, wash and dry it and then read the manual to figure out how to put it back together and use it. It actually came with a DVD, but I didn't have time for that...maybe someday. Finally, I got my onions and celery finely chopped. (If I had just used my mini-prep chopper, or even my 25 or 30 year old GE food processor that sounds vaguely like a helicopter, it would have been much faster and easier, but nooooo, I went the whole 9 yards.

I guess my point here is that this was another project (like cake decorating) that sounds like such a good idea at first but about half way through is not much fun anymore. Really, making the dressing is not hard at all, it was just the food processor activity that made it drag on.

The double recipe makes a boat load of dressing, well over a gallon. I split it up, then got the chicken and halved it, grabbed the bag of fresh spinach I also got for them and headed to their house. Gary was at the kitchen table and we visited a while before Dee took me to see how their bedroom looks. She's been wanting to redecorate in there for years and had finally ordered new bedding just before Gary went into the hospital. Since the contractors were working there on other things, she got them to paint the bedroom. It looks lovely. She's very happy with the new look.

Egg Bread

Sift together:
1 1/2 cups white corn meal
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda

Add:
1 egg, slightly beaten
2 cups buttermilk

Mix until blended. Meanwhile melt
2 tablespoons shortening in hot (450F) oven

Add hot drippings to cornbread mixture and mix well. Pour into hot pan and bake 20 to 25 minutes.

(In the good old nutritionally ignorant days, we used bacon grease instead of shortening. Ooooh!)
Just in case you think the recipe is missing something, there is no sugar or baking powder in it.

I cooked a (pie)pan of dressing for Wayne and I on Saturday. Then on Monday, I cooked a (pie)pan of dressing for Wendy and for Carolyn and another small batch for Wayne and I. As I said, it makes a boatload of dressing. I only doubled the recipe this time. At Christmas and Thanksgiving I quadruple it! Got to have leftovers, right?