Various recipes for this popular dish include lots of different ingredients, such as chicken liver, sausage, endouille, etc. But my Mom's recipe is of course my favorite and quite simple. The following is a close estimate (since no one has ever written down the actual amounts of any ingredients - until now!):

The Dressing Mix: Pan fry the ground meat well until all of the meat is well done. Put bell pepper, onion and garlic into food processor and "nearly" liquify it, then add this to the meat. The pepper/onion/garlic should sizzle as you stir it well into the meat. When the sizzling fades, add the mushroom steak sauce and a little water and allow the entire dressing mix to simmer for at least a half hour.

Dirty Rice: Cooked rice can be added to this mixture and thoroughly stirred. The more rice you add, the drier and "whiter" the resulting dressing will be. Adding the right amount of rice will result in a dress that is moist with the rice appearing very brown ("dirty").

Cornbread Dressing: Substitute crumbed cornbread for cooked rice.

Save some for later: Freeze the dressing mix, i. E., before adding rice/cornbread, separately. When needed, defrost the mix by heating it and add the rice or cornbread.

Pat Pate <Patpate@Tenet.Edu>