Another Oyster Dressing for the Holidays

Oyster dressing is a Southern classic and there are as many recipes as there are people who make it. This is my recipe and, of course, I think it's the best. This is an offshoot of a recipe I learned from one of my Aunts. Oddly enough she doesn't like oysters but she loves oyster dressing. The secrete to this recipe is not letting the oysters overwhelm the rest of the ingredients. This is hard to do because the oysters really want to take over. I will tell you how to keep them in check.

Many of the ingredients I use for this recipe are prepackaged items. Before you turn away in horror because of my betrayal of fresh ingredients, please read my reasons why. One it's quicker and time is at a premium around the holidays. Two it tastes better, well unless you saute everything in butter, but I'll get to that in a minute. Three it's "greener" and more "slow food movement."

You'll probably argue with the last and that's fine. I'd love to hear it, but let's examine one of the premixed packaged products. I use as an example PictSweet Seasoning Blend. It has green and red bell peppers in it. Do you really think that the bell peppers in your supermarket are locally grown in November or are they shipped from some place like Florida? Well I live in Florida and we aren't growing bell peppers in November where I am. You have to go to South Florida to find where they're growing summer vegetables in November and that's 550 miles or 8 1/2 hours from my house. Odds are they aren't any closer to you. Think about it. What is less expensive and uses less fuel: freezing and trucking 80 tons of bell peppers or trucking 20 tons of "fresh" bell peppers and throwing away half when the truck arrives because of spoilage? It makes a lot of sense, trucking those veggies all the way to your town just to throw them in your landfill - not really. Buy the flash frozen packages of veggies, not with the cheese sauce obviously. Use effectively the good technologies we have available to us.

About the butter. Several years ago my Dad had quintuple bypass surgery. Never heard of quintuple bypasses? Well it's when they replace every artery going into and out of the heart and the artery that feeds the heart. He was a bacon and beef couch potato man before the heart attack and he's a vegetarian now. Something about looking death in the eye changes your outlook on life. You might say well, he didn't exercise and ate bad for you stuff so what do you expect? I eat healthier and exercise so that won't happen to me. Well maybe, but my Dad's cousin, who's hobby is hiking, who has in fact hiked Mount Kilimanjaro, and who runs up and down the steps of The Swamp in Gainesville, Florida several times a week, guess what he had - a heart attack. Do you exercise as much as a guy who walked up and down Mount Kilimanjaro? On top of being a stark warning to me about the hazards of cholesterol these two heart attacks suggest to me that there is something to the genetic links to heart disease. Trust me, these two men may look alike and they may both live in Florida, but that's where their similarities end. That tells me I should mind my P's and Q's and save my cholesterol intake for things I really like.

This recipe makes 1 12"x8" tray of dressing which is approximately 12 1/2 cup servings.

• 1 12oz package of frozen PictSweet Seasoning Blend
• 1 4oz jar of sliced pimentos
• 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 16 oz package of corn bread stuffing
• 3 cups of chicken stock
• 1 pint of oysters
• 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes
• 2 teaspoons of coarsely ground black pepper
• 2 teaspoons of paprika
  

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F

Cut off the foot of the oysters. Then cut the oysters in half or quarters and saute them on the stove for about 5 minutes. Drain the juice, and put the oysters in your stuffing pan. Draining the liquid is crucial. If you don't, all your stuffing will taste like an oyster. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix. Put the pan in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Serve hot or cold.

I'll bet you thought it would be harder than that.