Southern Cornbread with Sage Casserole Recipe

Hi, I'm Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. We’re going to be making cornbread sage dressing. I'm going to start by sautéing some vegetables and those vegetables are onion and celery. So it took one half stick of margarine, I've got it melted over here and let met turn that on. And bring that back up to heat, you can see that I have used about one half a medium to large onion and I just used the top and chopped it right here and then this will go back in the vegetable bin on my refrigerator to be as for some other purpose and I have one stalk of celery that’s all I need. Because this is a very small scale that I'm making this on normally on Thanks Giving my guest are always like, its big. But we’re going to be using just a small deep dish flat plate to make dressing of the day.

So I'm going to put this half chopped onion and its one stick of chopped celery into my margarine. You can see that my celery and onion is cooked, the onion has turned clear and at this point I'm just going to turn this off and I’ll remove it from the heat at over here. And then I'm going to go over and start working on the other ingredients that go into my cornbread sage dressing.

One key ingredient is a packaged dressing mix. Now, I’ll be putting more to this so don’t go like this going to be just soft as chef its nothing like that. But I do use the herb season stuffing. And typically I've used the whole bag depending on what I was making this for. But this is all I had in the bag and I mentioned it out, to see how much I had. So I'm using, this is two cup container and this is a one cup container, so that two and one half cups, so it looks like that’s what's we’re going to go with. Two and one half cups of herb seasoned stuffing mix of compound, put that on a large bowl.

Now, here’s the secret, you need some cornbread or if not look and see if you can find some cornbread stuffing mix and then use that. Use and equal amount of cornbread to what you have of the herb season stuffing. Now, you'll asked why, if you are with me last night we made potato soup and I turned that potatoes—are along with the potato soup I cooked up some corn muffins. And I had combined it with butter leftover, so I just made it into cornbread.

And I'm going to take, got to think it might be two and a half cups to try and match what I have over there and just crumble that or measure it as it goes. So just crumble that in this measuring cup it will give me two cups of it. So I have my two cups and my one half cup of crumbled cornbread and you can see I have this much left over. I’ll just stick that in the Ziploc bag put it in my freezer and I’ll have it ready for some purpose. My cornbread or if you need to buy the cornbread mix that’s fine in with the herb season stuffing mix, so you just do that half and half. So I used two and one half cups of each.

Now, our cooked vegetables you can really see how clear those onions are now. And that margarine just adds a little extra flavor its there mainly to do the cooking but I certainly don’t want to get rid of it. I want to add that in and then a key ingredient comes up, which is our herb. And it happens to be sage, what I want you to do with the sage is to get up, for this amount let's say about a teaspoon I didn’t measure this but putting it to my hands about a teaspoon that I would use for this amount.

And now my last ingredient which is to me the most important in terms of the way you’ve cut all the amount you put in is chicken broth, it doesn’t matter what brand you use. I do kind of have a favorite but you're going to pour it in this is one can obviously that’s going to be enough if you stir it around you can never make you smell that. So here is the second can that I've opened and I got them ready. And that’s going to need it all. So I’ll stir this around this might have a chance.

So they’ll probably take this whole other can, I'm just going to do half just to be safe. This might do it and you can tell when it is has taken in as much as its going to take and then you can pat down on it and get liquid. That’s about where you want to be. So that looks about like what we want, so when we get that, that is a key element in making my dressing already to turn it into a baking dish and put it in a preheated oven. I do bake this at 350 degrees and typically for a fairly long time, if I have a very large dish. I'm going to start looking at this after about 30 minutes all that I think it could be done, I'm guessing maybe 45 minutes. But I will watch the time and let you know, what this sides of casserole is going to take.

So let's get our baking dish and prepare it with a little cooking spray, I'm using canola oil here, use any kind you like so that won't stick to the bottom sides. And then you'd better got have something that hasn’t slob in here. Something that sitting back and get some kind of spoon that will hold that liquid and I'm wasted my time getting this swimming in liquid and then to missed out on all the liquid because its going to slightest spin. So I'm making sure that I get plenty of dressing and plenty of liquid in there. And you see that liquid running around that’s fine, that’s what you want. And I’ll spread it out occasionally to see how we’re coming. I don’t want to fill it all the way up to the top because it probably would run over in that oven.

I think if you take it longer. You see that it—you want to pat down on it, there is very little liquid but there's still that tendency to give out liquid. If you don’t have that you don’t have enough broth and even at this point, I could pour some more in there if I've got lucky and needed it. I don’t think it does, I think this looks fine. So that’s where I'm going to put in the oven. You could see I have a good amount left and I have a smaller size parts dish, I just put it in that and cooked it probably sometime later. So we’re going to the oven, its already preheated to 350 degrees and I'm going to place this try at the middle somewhere on the shell.

Stick it in there and we want to set the timer so I can keep track of the time, I'm going to check it in 30 minutes and then I’ll be back ones it’s done and ready to come out of the oven. My dressing has been cooking for 30 minutes at 350 degrees and I just checked it a second ago and it looks done. I'm going to get it out, now you could let it cook a little bit longer. You could probably go to 45 minutes, that would just cooked more of the juice out of it if you want it nice and juicy and take it out at 30 minutes. Your oven might be a little bit different from mine and you just need to watch and when it looks to your desire consistency, think like it and take it out.

Here’s how it looks like if I want to just serve some on our plate. When its nice and potting hot and we just get some out and you say, it maintains a lot of that moisture that was put in it, it’s a nice recipe if you moist dressing. You can form it into balls and bake it if you prefer that but this is just nice dressing that could be used to stuff the inside of a turkey or it could a be as a side dish like this. So let me just—and this is very hot that I just kind of given the face, very good.