Feed Your Body Friday: Wild Rice, Apple, & Cranberry Stuffing
Happy Thanksgiving, Daily Life Family!
There’s no Thanksgiving dinner without turkey and no turkey without stuffing! My childhood memories of stuffing are not very appetizing. The stuffings of my childhood were soft, fatty, and generally not very good. This is what motivated me to create a healthier recipe for stuffing, filled with delicious, clean ingredients. Perfectly crunchy and well seasoned, it will perfectly accompany your Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Good stuffings usually have a variety of colours as the ingredients can vary according to your preferences. Usually, stuffing consists of meat, bread, or rice mixed with herbs and spices. Then, everything coheres with the addition of eggs. Today’s recipe is vegetarian and super healthy - we won’t use bread, but vegetables and fruits instead.
This stuffing can easily be prepared 1 or 2 days earlier to give you more time on Thanksgiving Day, which for some is pure madness! Let’s get started.
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Servings: 2 cups
Ingredients:
- 2 cups water
- 1/2 cup wild rice mix (I prefer wild rice and basmati rice)
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1 tbsp. olive oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 celery stalk, finely chopped
- 1 cup mushrooms
- 1 small Cortland apple, peeled, seeded, and diced
- 1 Toulouse sausage
- 1/4 cup dried chopped cranberries
- 2 tbsp. flat parsley, chopped
Preparation:
- In a saucepan, boil water, rice, and salt. Cover and simmer over medium heat for about 50 minutes or until rice bursts. Drain and reserve.
- In a large pan, soften the onion and celery over medium-low heat in olive oil for about 10 minutes or until translucent. Add the apple, the mushrooms, and sausage. Brown over high heat, crumbling the sausage with a wooden spoon. Add rice, cranberries, and parsley. Stir well. Adjust seasoning to taste.
Generally, some stuffing will be put inside your turkey and the rest serves as an accompaniment (or leftovers!). While everything is a matter of taste, stuffing is also key to keeping the turkey’s shape while cooking.
Quick little tip: To have a beautiful cooked stuffed turkey, it’s essential to introduce the stuffing only once cooled (cooked at most 24 hours in advance, otherwise it may dry). This must be done just before the introduction to the oven. To stuff, simply fill the cavity of the turkey - just don’t pack it too much because stuffing swells and expands when cooking. If you put too much, the turkey may split in half, so don’t go overboard.
