Our family’s all-time favorite homemade stuffing recipe! A warm and comforting dish, my mom’s stuffing recipe tastes like love and comfort and home. It’s not Thanksgiving in our house without this stuffing on our plates.
Thanksgiving is nearly here and life is feeling extra crazy at the moment. We will be hosting my in-laws for Thanksgiving in our rental home and dining among boxes as our move into the new house is quickly approaching. It would be easy to just breeze through Thanksgiving this year and opt out of all the usual fanfare but that would mean missing out on some of my all-time favorite foods and that just cannot happen. Thanksgiving without my mom’s stuffing? Neverrr.
We’ll be dialing Thanksgiving back a bit but with my mother-in-law in town, you know there will be lots of delicious food on the table. (I’m looking at you pineapple soufflé and glazed carrots!) During the years when we do not spend Thanksgiving with my parents, one of my contributions to Thanksgiving must always and forever be my mom’s stuffing. It is one of my favorite recipes on the planet and our entire family’s favorite Thanksgiving dish. It’s everything I want in a stuffing recipe and tastes like love and home on a plate.
When I initially asked my mom for her stuffing recipe years ago, she said, “I don’t really know because I just sort of wing it.” She said the same thing about her monkey bread recipe and I’ve come to realize that these recipes she knows by heart and feel are her very best. My mom is a wonderful human (and mother) and was kind enough to painstakingly measure out everything for her stuffing recipe for me a while back (stay tuned for her monkey bread recipe!) and over the years, I’ve heard from so many of you who have made and love this recipe, too. Knowing you’re enjoying one of our family’s favorite dishes with your loved ones fills me with that mushy-gushy love feeling and makes me feel all the more close to you guys. Thank you for trusting me (and my mom!) with your holiday meals.
For those new to my mom’s stuffing recipe, here’s everything you need to make it:
- 2 loaves bread (any kind of bread, white, wheat, French, rolls, etc.) and you want it to be stale!
- Onion
- Celery (I don’t trust a stuffing recipe that doesn’t include celery!)
- Butter
- Fresh parsley (adds the perfect pop of green!)
- Chicken or vegetable broth
- Eggs
- Spices: Garlic salt, pepper, poultry seasoning
I hope you all enjoy the updated pictures of my mother’s stuffing recipe and a blog post actually dedicated to this beloved family recipe this time! (It was previously a throw-in mention in a past post in 2011.) If you’re looking for a slam-dunk stuffing recipe to try for Thanksgiving this year and decide to give this one a go, I hope it fills your belly with the feeling of home and comfort and love and everything wonderful.
Happy (almost) Thanksgiving!
My Mom’s Stuffing Recipe
My Mom’s Stuffing Recipe
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 45 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour
Description
A warm and comforting dish, my mom’s stuffing recipe tastes like love and comfort and home. It’s not Thanksgiving in our house without this stuffing on our plates.
- 2 loaves stale bread (any kind of bread, white, wheat, French, rolls, etc.) – We use one loaf of white bread and one loaf of oatmeal wheat bread and rip them up and leave the pieces out overnight so they get stale
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 2 stalks celery, chopped
- ½ stick butter + a little more to butter casserole dish
- 1 bunch parsley
- 1 large (32-ounce) container chicken or vegetable broth
- 2 eggs
- A few heavy shakes of garlic salt
- A few sprinkles of pepper
- 2 teaspoons poultry seasoning
Instructions
- Rip 2 loaves of stale bread into pieces. (It is great if you can do this step the day before making the stuffing, allowing the bread to sit out on a couple of baking sheets overnight to become extra stale.)
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Melt ½ stick of butter in large skillet. Watch closely so your butter does not brown and add onion and celery to the butter over low to medium heat.
- When onion and celery are lightly browned and tender, remove skillet from burner.
- Remove long stems from a handful of parsley. (You want mostly the fluffy part. I use regular parsley, but curly is okay.) Chop the parsley – making sure to keep it from being ground too much. You still want to have some identifiable leaves.
- Beat two eggs.
- Place half the bread crumbs in a large mixing bowl and add the melted butter, onion and celery mixture, chopped parsley, beaten eggs, a few shakes of garlic salt, a sprinkle of pepper and poultry seasoning.
- Gently mix the above mixture with your hands to distribute as evenly as you can among all the bread pieces, adding the rest of the bread pieces as you go. As you discover how dry your mixture is, slowly supplement with chicken broth, making sure to keep the mixture on the dry side. If you make it too moist, it will still be fine, but the texture of your stuffing will be more dense. You can make it more moist by adding more broth or less moist by adding more bread pieces. Experiment as you add the remaining bread pieces, using chicken broth to make it stick together. Do not mix longer than it takes to make the mixture moist and consistent.
- Butter the inside of a large baking dish. Place stuffing into dish and cover with foil.
- Bake 45 min. with foil on and then 15 minutes without the foil to allow the top to brown.
- Serve with your holiday favorites and enjoy!
More of Our Family’s Favorite Holiday Recipes
