Sausage, Apple, and Fennel Corn Bread Dressing

A major factor in how we select recipes for any holiday is how much maintenance they require. (We suspect the same is true for many of you!) After all, when you're already planning to spend several hours in the kitchen, why commit yourself to more?

This year, though, we wondered whether we'd been unfairly limiting ourselves all this time. Maybe, by taking the term "labor of love" a little more literally, we could reap greater culinary rewards.

Enter Sausage, Apple, and Fennel Corn Bread Dressing (Cooking Light, 2006). This recipe has a record-setting 22 ingredients, a 4-star reader rating, and a Test Kitchen Guarantee. Surely it had to be worth the extra effort, right? With gusto, we accepted the challenge.

Step 1 was a reasonably simple undertaking: make corn bread. No frills, very simple cornbread. This step took about 5 minutes to assemble, 16 minutes to bake, and 5 minutes worth of cooling time. You could save yourself that time by buying pre-made corn bread from your local bakery; however, if you're looking for ways to make the holidays healthier, doing so leaves you with less control over fat and calories.

While baking the cornbread, it's possible to get a jump-start on preparing the sausage mixture. You'll notice from our ingredient line-up that we'd chopped all of our produce up the night before. It's not necessary to do so, especially since you'll want something to do while that cornbread is cooling, but we can vouch for the fact that all of the pre-chopped ingredients withstood 16 hours in the fridge.

Next, in stages, our produce was added to a non-stick pan and sauteed in olive oil. This process took about 20 minutes and our persistence paid off in the form of pleasant aromas in our kitchen! Once the sautee was completed, the mixture was cooled to room temperature before moving on.

While we waited for our sausage mixture to cool, we went ahead and crumbled the cornbread into a large bowl. It was similar to playing with one of those squeezable stress balls that were popular years ago - a nice little stress reliever for holiday season! Then we incorporated the sausage mixture, the broth, and eggs, and spread everything out into a 9x13 baking dish. The dish went into our preheated oven for 50 minutes - time we used to whip up some mashed potatoes and carve up our turkey!

Because we needed to farm out our baking dish for another tasty treat, we piled our finished dressing into another serving bowl, shown at left. To keep it warm, we covered the bowl with aluminum foil and stashed it in the microwave. Seriously, if you ever find yourself taking direction from a recipe to "keep [something] warm", look no further than that small, insulated space in your kitchen - it is perfect!

Now for the verdict: This stuffing is...good. Not great, nowhere close to what mom used to make, but a good, solid alternative. Maybe we'd gotten ourselves amped up for the fruits of our long and distinguished labors, but we were mostly underwhelmed. With strong ingredients like fennel involved, we expected to produce a symphony of flavors and ended up tapping out "Chopsticks" instead.

One reviewer on Cooking Light's website added dried cranberries, which we think might have broken up the beige blandness. Some almonds or walnuts might also provide another layer of texture and flavor. Something was just missing - so let us know if you find it!