Alternative Dressings and Glazes for Thanksgiving Turkey

I do not always want to "do turkey" for Thanksgiving and an informal poll among my friends shows that some of them feel the same. Sometimes it's about just doing the turkey a new way. Sometimes it's about doing something entirely different. Doing turkey a new way is relatively simple and requires little money or effort for stunningly different effects. Here are some ideas from friends, family, and my own kitchen.

The first thing we talked about was radically new stuffing treatments for the bird. My husband uses lots of chopped apples, raisins, onions, celery, and bell peppers in his ever popular bread dressing so it is fruity and savory at the same time.

I like sage dressings but not everyone does so here are some recipes for "other than sage" dressings.

Chorizo and Walnut Stuffing

Use about a pound of cooked chorizo with the casing removed and crumble it up small.

Chop one to one and a half cup of celery and one really large onion or two medium ones.

One teaspoon of Mama Dash original seasoning

You can salt to taste or use salted butter or margarine.

One quarter teaspoon of pepper will be plenty

Two cans of chicken broth

One and a half cup of broken walnut meats

32 ounces of bread stuffing or croutons unseasoned

Cook the sausage, onion and celery in a heavy pan until the onion is transparent and the celery is tender. Drain the excess fats.

Leave the sausage, celery and onion mixture in the pan and add the butter, seasonings and broth and simmer gently for about forty five minutes.

Add the bread stuffing and the walnut meats and gently stir to moisten all the bread pieces. Stuff the turkey and bake as usual.

A little note about this is that if you want the sage you can put it in also. You will note that this stuffing is lower in salt and you can add salt to taste if you like.

We all agreed that if you make your stuffing in a big, heavy pan and stuff the bird with hot stuffing and put it right into a hot oven it helps the bird stay moist and also cooks it faster.

Wild Rice stuffing was a favorite idea with some of us but then we decided that it would really work better with roast goose or duckling. Not a bad idea and certainly a great change from turkey.

The consensus within our informal session was that the traditional turkey was improved greatly by non-traditional glazes. Some favorites were: Kiwi with Raspberry Jam and White Zinfandel Wine glaze. Make it while the turkey is roasting. Use two cups of Raspberry jam, I prefer home made jam but any high quality Raspberry Jam is fine. Mix with one cup of White Zinfandel Wine, and the zest of one lemon. Cook the mixture over low heat for five minutes or until it starts to thicken then spoon over the cooked turkey. Slice about four or five kiwis and place over the turkey, spoon the glaze up from the bottom of the pan and over the kiwi slices. Bake about four to six minutes to set the glaze and repeat the spooning of glaze from the bottom of the pan over the kiwi and turkey, bake again until kiwi and turkey are well glazed.

Another glaze we all thought was pretty fine and very much seasonal was the Maple Syrup and Cranberry Sauce Glaze. Use two 16 ounce cans of cranberry sauce and one half cup of Karo Maple flavored syrup or real Maple syrup and two tablespoons of grated orange peel. Cook together gently until slightly thick and spoon over the cooked turkey.

We finished up our session by taste testing a simple glaze made with orange marmalade and whole cloves gently simmered and spooned over the turkey....well actually we used some chicken breasts because we didn't want to cook a whole turkey...The glaze was absolutely terrific and because there were several of us the cloves could have been more, or less, or were just perfect.....hmmmm. Well we all agreed that it was easy enough to adjust that to taste. We all thought that it would work for ham as well.