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Re: Thanksgiving dinner

We've done a stuffing for Thanksgiving for the last several years.  It's
a little different each year, but it goes something like this:

- One -LARGE- mixing bowl (we use a metal bowl about 16" across and 6-7"
deep, which used to get used for mixing bread dough before we got the
KitchenAid mixer)
- One 13x9x2 baking pan

- Onion
- Bell peppers (red, green, etc.)
- Mushrooms (white button, shiitake, portobello, etc.)
- Zucchini
- Summer squash
- Whole water chestnuts
- Toasted bread chunks (either make your own by toasting individual
slices of a loaf or two of good bread, or buy the prepackaged stuffing
mix thingies that folks like Pepperidge Farm put out)
- Spices (see note below)
- HOT water

Chop up the veggies into little chunkies about the size of a chickpea. 
Mix them all together in the bowl.  Add in the bread chunks and mix
well.  Slowly drizzle in the hot water while stirring with a large spoon
(having two people working on it at this point often helps -- one
drizzles, one tosses the contents of the bowl with two wooden spoons). 
Add enough water to make the bread chunkies just moist, but not enough
to turn them to mush.  Mix in spices to taste.  Pack as much of it as
you can possibly fit into the baking pan.  Cover with foil.  Bake at
350F until heated through (takes somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, if
I remember correctly -- we started checking it regularly around 30
minutes in).  Remove the foil and leave in the oven for another 10
minutes or so, to crisp up the top.

NOTE: we use Bell's stuffing spice (little orange cardboard box), but
you can also use a mix of thyme, basil, oregano, and -lots- of sage.  

Feel free to use any veggies you like in this -- we tend to add anything
that looks particularly fresh in the produce section (we've even done
broccoli chunks in the past).  We love the canned water chestnuts -- you
may not.  We've done this with a toaster and a couple of loaves of
bread, and we've done it with the Pepperidge Farm mix bags, and it's
always come out good.

And one nice thing about this -- if it doesn't all fit in the baking
pan, you can eat the remainder raw! :)

One year we didn't have time to deal with toasting bread, and couldn't
find any Pepperidge Farm mixes, so we substituted a brown and wild rice
blend (cooked beforehand) for the bread and decreased the amount of
water we used.  We had people -begging- us for the recipe!

Faith
--
Faith                       |"Censorship ends in logical completeness
faith@xxxxxxxxx             |when nobody is allowed to read any books
http://www.senie.com/faith/ |except the books that nobody can read."
                            | -- George Bernard Shaw