Family Circle Apple-Sausage Stuffing

I'm lucky that my husband will normally eat my food without complaints. However, the one complaint that he frequently voices about my culinary skills is my lack of ability to make a dish more than once. My husband claims that if he likes a dish and tells me how much he enjoys it, he will never see it again. I think he has now gotten to the point that he never tells me if he loves something for fear that it will never make an appearance at the dinner table again in the foreseeable future. The one exception to this rule is the holidays. I am pretty stuck in my ways about what I like to fix at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Every once in a while I will try a new variety of mashed potatoes or biscuit, but the main food categories still remain. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving this year I decided to experiment with new side dish recipes and came across a recipe for Apple-Sausage Stuffing in the November issue of Family Circle magazine, which looked easy to prepare and a great new way to make a traditional holiday side dish.

This recipe has 13 ingredients. It takes approximately at hour to prep and cook, and makes 8 servings. All the ingredients I was easily able to find at my local grocery store. I used homemade chicken stock and whole-wheat bread which I made the day before to save time during dinner prep. Since I don't salt my chicken stock I had to add a larger amount of salt than if I had bought store bought stock. I found the stuffing to be too dry with the amount of chicken broth stated in the recipe, I would suggest adding additional stock until the stuffing looks sufficiently moist. As written the stuffing was too dry for my family's liking. I would also suggest making sure that your cubes of bread are small enough for them to get toasted adequately. Normally I would always use homemade bread, but this recipe I think might actually work better with store bought. I found that the consistency of the homemade bread didn't work as well as I would have liked. Part of that could have been due to the fact that 10 slices of homemade bread can be vastly different than 10 pieces of store bought. I followed the remainder of the recipe as written.

I liked the combination of the granny smith apple and the sweet sausage in this stuffing. It lent a nice sweet/tart taste to the overall flavor of the stuffing. I think I would have preferred white bread for the bread cubes. The whole-wheat was a little over powering to the rest of the flavor. White bread would allow the flavor of the granny smith and sausage to shine through more effectively. Overall, this recipe would work well as a side dish for poultry or pork and takes very little prep. 

For the recipe go to Apple-Sausage Stuffing.