Mama Elisa's "Vegan Shmeegan" Italian Pork Stuffing

Attention meat lovers! Why have bread stuffing when you can have pork? Nothing on a carnivore's Thanksgiving table beats meat stuffed with meat! This is a "family recipe" that I assume originally came down from my Spanish grandmother but I only remember Mom making it. This stuffing (also the homemade Parker House rolls and chocolate pie) made Thanksgiving Thanksgiving in my house growing up.

Step 1: Ingredients

The first thing you are going to need is a forty year old handwritten greasy recipe card with vague guidelines to making the stuffing. If you don't have one you can print out my pictures! The card gives you the general ingredients but isn't incredibly helpful overall.

Here's what to buy for a 10-12 lb bird (adjust accordingly to your required bird size):

2 lbs pork sausage
(Normally I like to go with the fresh breakfast sausage from the butcher, but in a pinch or for larger batches Jimmy Dean works fine. Jimmy Dean Italian is even better.)
2 eggs
2 small onions
(I always end up chopping more onion than I actually use. I guess it depends both on your definition of "small onion" and how much onion you are cool with using.)
1/2 loaf day old Italian bread
Various Italian spices (I usually use oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage and "italian seasoning")
Giblets from the turkey

Special equipment:

Food processor/grinder
Large frying pan and spatula
onion dicer (optional)

Step 2: Prepare the Bread

Cut up your day old bread and reduce it to crumbs in your cuisinart.

Step 3: Prepare the Onions

Chop up the onions. I like them diced but my eyeballs can't hack dicing the old fashioned way, so I use this awesome chopper to reduce the sting.

Step 4: Prepare the Meat

Grind up the sausage with the giblets in the cuisinart. You don't really need to grind the sausage, but I find doing it this way mixes in the ground giblets more quickly and efficiently than grinding and adding separately.

Step 5: Cooking

Brown the meat on the stove. When done, remove the meat, trying to keep as much of the excess grease in the pan as possible. Cook the onions in the grease until translucent. (I usually keep a bit of the meat in the pan when cooking the onions.) When done, mix the onions in with the meat.

Step 6: Add Spices

If you want me to tell you how much spice to ask, well, I'm not going to tell you. I add a LOT more than the piddling teaspoon suggested on Mom's recipe card. Add as much as you want. Liberal use of spice is encouraged. Don't skimp on the rosemary either, I think that one is the key. NOTE: if you use the Jimmy Dean Italian, you probably won't need to add as much spice at this stage.

Step 7: Add Egg and Bread

Mix in the egg, and then mix in the bread. Or, you can do it the other way around if you you want. The egg is really just to provide a little more moisture to bond the meat to the bread.

Step 8: Cram It Up Your Cram Hole, Lafleur!

Now comes the part where we have the only appropriate opportunity of the year to quote from the movie Dodgeball, in which we stuff the stuffing into every available cavity in the uncooked turkey. If you have stuffing leftover that doesn't fit into the bird, you can finish it off with a little time in the oven in a casserole dish. It will taste pretty good, but will pale in comparison to the awesomeness produced when the stuffing matures inside a cooked turkey.