And I will also be providing pics for the vegetarian main I made last year - baked camembert:

Preheat oven to 200C. Take a whole camembert, place in a small, lightly buttered baking dish, sprinkle over with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and slivered almonds. Bake for 25 mins until deliciously golden on the outside and runny in the middle. Serves two with cranberry sauce, rocket (arugula) and roast veg. Yum!

I make mushroom stuffing.

The day before, cube up some french bread and put it in a big roasting dish. Let it dry out overnight. It should be fairly crouton-like. If you need to, put it in a low oven to dry the bread out more. Alternatively, you can buy packaged stuffing cubes.

Make a mushroom stock. Basically, simmer a pound of mushrooms for an hour. That's it. Mushroom stock.

Okay, now. Saute some onions, garlic, and a little celery until the vegetables are soft. Throw in a couple cups of chopped mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms release their liquid.

Season the vegetable mixture with salt, pepper, thyme, and sage. Season it very well -- it has to flavor all the bread.

Mix the vegetable mixture with the bread. Throw in a 1/2 cup of toasted pecans. You can also add chunks of Granny Smith apple if you like the sweet/savory thing.

Add mushroom stock to the bread/veggies until the whole mixture is about as wet as a wrung-out sponge. Don't add too much. You can always add a touch more when it's cooking if it seems too dry.

Bake in a 350 oven. For how long? Until it's done! That's how long!

If you have leftover mushroom stock, you can make mushroom gravy. Yum.

mudpuppie, that sounds incredible, I can't wait to try it. Any tips on the mushroom gravy?

Heya goo!

Here is turtlegirl's dressing recipe. In our opinion dressing should be made outside of the bird.

http://food.thescullys.org/holiday-stuffing/

One week before, fill a roasting pan with white bread. Two loaves. Let dry. Rip by hand into small chunks.

In a large skillet, melt two sticks at least of butter. Add some chopped fresh onion (a half?) and chopped celery (two cups? That sounds like it might be too much). Add one to two tablespoons of sage (closer to two), half to a teaspoon of thyme, a TEASPOON of salt, and a tablespoon of pepper.

Slowly stir in ripped bread. Add butter as necessary. Adjust to taste.

Cool. Add a quarter cup of milk.

Form into round balls. They should stick and form balls about two thirds the size of a baseball. Place balls in tin foil, in a pyramid. You should see onion and celery and bread chunks in the moist balls. Take a large round pasta or baking bowl, or the roasting pan that you ripped the bread in, put a little bit of water in the bottom, and place the sealed tin-foil pyramid in the vessel. Steam for about 45 minutes at about 375.

If it seems dry on a thrity minute check, sprinkle water on the pyramid.

Nom.

Oh, yah, this is totally an outside the bird thing.

Coldchef or others, I'm so looking at you for oyster dressing recipes.

Wow these all sound great (and hiya terrapin!). And these are all vegetarian! I thought stuffing generally had pork? or something? in it. So I will try them all outside of the bird first before deciding which to make for the bird and include in the newsletter. Thanks Mecha stars - and more recipes to try always welcome!

Oh, and I have a couple of tasters handy for non-veg recipes, too, in case that might have been confusing for anyone...

I make little cornbread muffins served with maple butter (maple syrup mashed up into unsalted butter) and call it stuffing. This works because in my mind it has everything good that stuffing has (sweet and savory and fatty and carby) with none of the annoyance of trying to find a good moist to dry balance in regular stuffings.

Plus, just me and my partner eat it and we don't care much about traditional stuffing.

Any tips on the mushroom gravy?

Indeed.

Saute minced shallots (or onion) and chopped mushrooms in butter. Season with thyme, S&P. Add 2 tablespoons or so of flour to make a roux. Stir and cook until the flour smells a little toasty. Add 1/2 cup of wine -- both white and red work -- and reduce. Add mushroom stock. Simmer until the mixture thickens. If it doesn't get as thick as you want it, you can add a flour or cornstarch slurry and bring to a boil.

I dunno about stuffing recipes, but the best turkey I ever had was when I was in college, and the place I did my internship gave all the employees a frozen turkey. Now being a college student, I didn't have much use for it, so it sat in the freezer at my apartment until mid-spring when my roommate and I decided to cook it up one weekend and have friends over. My roommate called his grandmother for her recipe for stuffing and cooking the turkey. I don't remember the stuffing recipe, but for basting the bird she said to use a large bottle of white wine.

As I said, that was the best turkey ever, and friends brought dishes to have with it. Hard to explain the atmosphere, but it was so nice to spend the afternoon with our best friends, and have this huge feast. It was one of those truly happy moments in my life I wish I could recapture. Amazing what you can do with a bottle of wine...

I boned out my turkey and stuffed it with a mix of pork mince, 1 finely-minced onion, toasted pine-nuts, finely-diced semi-dried apricots (normal dried ones are fine), a few cloves of finely-mashed garlic, salt and pepper. Rub turkey roll with olive oil and season with salt - taking care to rub it into the skin which will go nice and crispy.

(I totally botched the trussing and ended up using metal skewers to keep the damn thing rolled and neat and they actually worked very well.)

The turkey roll went into an oiled pan along with a couple of cups of hard cider and was baked for 2 hours. I also baked the potatoes and carrots in the same pan so they got the benefit of the juice and cider and they were dark, tasty delights.

Boned turkeys are perfect for stuffing!! I'm considering a boned-out turducken for Christmas this year.

I cook up some sausage, just bob evans or whatever, and sautee mushrooms in butter, then I mix them in with a pretty basic bread stuffing. Sometimes I add slivered almonds. One year I put in diced apples, too. It always goes over well. I sometimes like to use day-old ripped up dinner rolls instead of bread, since the higher crust to middle ratio keeps it from getting too soggy.

I brine the turkey with apple cider, and baste with it, too. It started when I was on an "eat local" kick, since apples are a major crop in western NY. I also do the butter under the skin thing for cooking. I let it soften and smash in poultry seasoning (the kind in the little yellow box with the turkey on the front that looks like the graphics were done in 1938. Bells or Balls or something like that. Everyone in my family has been using it for so long I didn't even realize there were other varieties of poultry seasoning.)

My mother-in-law's giblet & chestnut rice dressing is so good I could just eat that and some salad, forget the rest, and be sublimely happy... but I don't have her recipe. I'll ask V. to call her and get it this evening.

Thanks mudpuppie, I can't wait to try both of your recipes!

I've been thinking about finding a mushroom gravy for a long time. It would have gone over great when I made mashed potatoes the other night.

My oven / range has been broken since Saturday so I can hardly wait to cook something once it's fixed!

I've made this stuffing and it was pretty dang awesome.

Thanks guys! I'll make a bunch of these this weekend and see how it goes.

I love stuffing. I saute a lot of onion and celery until quite soft, in a lot of butter. Add sage and a bit of rosemary. Add whole wheat bread cubes. Add lots of homemade stock. Toss. Bake. Serve with gravy.

I've made stuffing with cornbread, sausage, added apples, mushrooms, pecans, and I always go back to the basic recipe.

It looks like you are talking about the stuffing that is servered with dinner, not the stuff you, er, stuff into the bird itself.

I was talking to a chef one time about turkeys and he said to never use bread inside the bird. Dry stuff like bread draws juice out of the bird. He recommended things that are themselves juicy.

For bird stuffing, I use:

1 cube real butter, softened but not melted
1 sliced apple
1 sliced orange
1 sliced (some other fruit)

That'll give you a nice, flavorful, juicy turkey.

I'm open to any and all suggestions, trinity8-director! I've never made it before, and haven't eaten it since childhood and even then never a proper, winter-xmas turkey stuffing (it's the hottest part of the year in Australia, and xmas dinner is seafood and turkey and ham cold cuts, cooked somewhere other than your kitchen unless you are insane) so it's all new to me. My dad used to cook chicken in the Weber, stuffed with butter, whole lemons and brown sugar - it sounds similar to what you're describing.

And I left a couple of steps out of the baked camembert recipe above - sorry. Brush the cheese with melted butter before sprinking the goodies, and top with lots of salt and pepper before putting it in the oven. Not a recipe for those on strict diets, obvs, but hey it's a holiday.