Fun in Your Kitchen – Part 2 | Healthy Meals & Simple Cooking Inspiration with Coach Debbie Bookman

Hi. Welcome back for part two of Fun in youn Kitchen. I'm Debbie, your health coach for today. And with part one, I showed you that we had completed the cornbread for the stuffing. Now today we're going to be making from the same magazine that I had showed you originally, the gluten, simply gluten free. And you can find it on the website, gluten free and more. And the name of this recipe is Bacon Leek and Cornbread. The Corn Free Cornbread Stuffing. All right, so what I did here is I sliced the bread into little cubes. This was after I had it. Cool. And now I'm going to put it in a just a baking pan and I'm going to just scoop it out of here and separate all of the little cubes. And while I'm doing that, I'm preheating my oven to 225. We're just gonna get that all scooped out of the pan. And then you want to try to break up any parts that maybe just didn't cut all the way through. And you want to keep it as much as you can. You want to have a pan large enough so that it is in a single layer just like this. And so what we're going to do is we're going to cook this now for approximately 20 minutes. And while we're doing that, we're going to then be cooking the bacon, leeks and the celery that will go in into the stuffing. I'm going to go ahead and put this in the oven. I'm going to set my timer for 20 minutes. Now I have pre cut my the bacon and the leeks and the celery. But I wanted to show you basically the sizes that I'm just that I've cut it into. I'm just taking the long strips of bacon and I'm going to be making half of the recipe. I talked about that in part one. So all of my measurements are going to be done in halves. I've diced up the bacon. What I usually do is I just cut it lengthwise and then maybe depending on how wide the bacon strip is, I might cut it twice. And then I just cut the opposite way with a kitchen scissors. So I done that. And that is about a quarter of a pound of bacon. Then the leeks are just chopped up and the celery which is hiding down here at the bottom. Let me grab a few pieces. I've just diced up as well. Now they say finely chopped in the recipe. And I like my stuffing A little bit chunkier. If you want to make yours a little bit less chunky, then cut it up. And a good way to do it, if you don't want to do it by hand, is if you have a food processor or even a blender, a high speed blender. If you just pulse it, if you put some of this in there, you can get it chopped up pretty quickly. I just wanted to show you the part of the leek that we're going to be using. This is one leek and the recipe calls for the white part of the leek. So I'm going to cut off a good portion of this and I still have a little bit of the green part at the top, but I'm going to take off this whole big hard top to it. If you were making vegetable broth, this would be great to use in your, in your recipe. So now what I usually do with this, but I'm going to slice it lengthwise. But one thing I do want to mention about leeks. Leeks grow in a very sandy environment. And so what you really need to do prior to using your leeks is just fill up your sink with some cool water and let them soak in there. And a lot of the sandy gritty that might be found in the leak will be washed away. So I've cut off the end, I've cut off the top. Now I'm going to cut it lengthwise. Want to show you how, how I did it. And then I'm going to probably just cut it in half one more time for each side. And again, you could do this in a food processor or a high speed blender and just pulse so it just doesn't get mush. You want to have some chunkiness. And then what I do is I just, I'm going to just cut this going in the opposite direction. And then if you see the leak here, I'll show you up close. It has a lot of different layers in there, so when you're cutting it across, you're really getting a lot of little, little pieces. I'm going to just cut a few here so you can just get a sense for how that looks. And things don't have to be cut uniformly. This is all going to get mixed together. So no real concern for that and no real concern that your little cubes from the cornbread are exactly perfect. Doesn't really matter. All right, so what are we going to do next? While the, the cubes are, they're, they're, they're not necessarily going to brown what we're doing here for the 20 minutes. It's just helping to take some of the moisture out of the cornbread so that it's. The stuffing isn't too wet. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to pause the recording for a moment and I'm going to move over to the stovetop and get my computer set up so that I can show you how we go about cooking the vegetables and the bacon. Okay, so I'm back here at the stove. Maybe a little bit hard to see, but I will show you as I'm working. So I'm ready preheating my pan so that it's hot. Nothing needs to be added to the pan. The fat from the bacon will be sufficient and just gonna use like a wooden spatula to spread out the bacon and help it cook and you'll be able to see better how bacon looks. And they will separate the pieces as you cook them. I have the heat on about medium, maybe a medium high just to get it started. And then as necessary, I will turn it down if I need to. But that's just what it's looking for now. And it's going to take about eight minutes or so for the bacon to crisp up. And so we will, I will do that and then I will come back and I will show you what we do with the celery and the, and the leeks. Okay, so I'm back now. The bacon is, as you can see, is starting to get a little bit crispy and it's going to continue to cook with the, the leeks and the celery. So for my half recipe, I put in approximately two leeks and two long stalks of celery. Maybe I, if they were smaller, I may have done three stalks. And now I'm just going to add all of this that I've already pre chopped into the pan and mixing it all together. And we want to cook this. Oh, probably about going to say maybe 10 minutes or so. You want the leeks and the celery to get tender, but you don't want them to like totally get be brown when they're just slightly looking like they're starting to get a little bit on the brown side. That's when we would stop cooking this. But I would say about takes me about 10 minutes. And it depends also on the size of your pan. If you don't like. This pan's a little bit smaller, so I have multiple layers, the leeks on top of each other. So I like to try to Keep stirring it and mixing it around. If you have a larger pan, it may take a little bit less because you have more of this leak touching the actual pan. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pause again the recording and then when this is about ready to when this is done, and I will show you what that looks like, and then we will complete putting together the stuff. Okay, I am back. Since I've been away cooking up the leeks and bacon and onion, I just want to show you what that looks like. They're not real browned, but they're tender. We want to make sure that they are. They are tender soft. Now, in the meantime, the 20 minutes that I cooked the cornbread cubes, and as you can see that, you know, they're not like toasted or anything, but they're just a little bit like I said earlier, that the moisture has been taken up. So the other thing I did is once I removed the cornbread cubes out, I changed the temperature on my oven to 350 degrees because that is the temperature that we are going to be cooking the actual stuffing. Now, one thing I do want to say is that the stuffing for this recipe can be used inside your turkey. You want to stuff your turkey. I typically like to just make it in a separate bowl when I make it rather than stuff it in the turkey, but it can be done that way. But. But one thing you want to make sure that you do is that you. That all of this gets cool before you actually stuff it in the turkey. And then any extra can be put into a casserole dish and then baked the way we are going to do it today. All right, so I'm going to and a little warm. So I'm going to just move all of the cornbread into a large bowl. And again, as I said, this is just half of the recipe. And you can see it will still make quite a bit. So no reason not. Not to make it in half. Or you can make two smaller ones and freeze one for a later time. Let me just set this over here. All right, so we've got my large bowl. Now what we're going to do is to take the vegetable, bacon and vegetable mixture, and we are going to pour it all just from the pan right on top of the bread. And then we want to mix this all together, just lightly mixture. We don't want to make the bread fall apart. We'll stay, should stay without a problem. But we just want to get all of the vegetables mixed in with the Cornbread. Okay. Then once we've done that, we're going to add one egg. If you're doing the half version, or as the recipe calls for, two eggs. If you're using the full version, and I've already broken the egg and lightly stirred up the egg, I'm going to pour that in there. Okay. And then it's calling for poultry seasoning. So I'm going to use one tablespoon. I have a teaspoon here, so I'm do three teaspoons again, splitting up the amount. It would have been 2 tablespoons for the full amount. And this is poultry seasoning. McCormick makes an organic poultry seasoning so that you can see that. And then I'm going to add one cup of bone broth. Now, the recipe calls for chicken broth, but bone broth is important because it will give this, especially since there's, you know, this is more of a carb type side dish. By putting in the bone broth will help to give us a little bit more protein rather than just using the plain pick and broth. And I always like to use an organic one. And the one I chose where I am was by a company called Bonafide. I like Kettle and Fire Pacific brand also works real well. All right, so we've got that in there. And then I think that is everything. All right, so we are going to just want to just double check the eggs, the poultry seasoning, and the bone broth. All right, so we're going to put it in a casserole dish. This one might be a little small, but I'm going to just show you how we go ahead and finish it. I did grease the inside of the pan, so you could use. I used ghee. If you're again dairy free, you could use a little bit of olive oil or avocado oil to grease the dish with. All right, so I'm gonna just scoop this in here. If I can hold on to the bowl and do that. I wish you could just smell how good this smells just even before it's cooked. All right, so it did fit in there very nicely. And then on top, you could either drizzle olive oil or avocado oil if you wanted to be totally dairy free. Or in my case, I'm going to just drizzle on some of this ghee is melted here. I'm going to just drizzle a little bit on top and that will just help it brown up a little bit. And I'll just move that out just a little through the top. And I just heard that the oven is ready. So I'm going to put this in the oven and I have pre made one ahead of time. So I will get that for you and I will let you see what the final product will look like. Okay. Now, the stuffing will be, will cook again, I said, at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. And when it's all finished, look how beautiful and brown that is. And take a little goop here and it just looks like regular, regular, regular stuffing. Well, I hope that you enjoyed this series of fun in the kitchen. And I hope that this will help to make your Thanksgiving just a little bit better so that you can enjoy the traditional stuffing that we all love and enjoy during that holiday. And just remember, this is a recipe that can be made at any time. It doesn't have to be made only on Thanksgiving. Until next time.