So it's approaching the decision day for the big T-Day meal and I'm struggling with the same issue I face each year:  isn't stuffing the same as potatoes?

Since it's no longer considered a food safe practice to stuff your turkey, stuffing is now cooked outside the bird.  I saw a clever way to do this:  create individual stuffings for each guest in a muffin tin.  It looked cute and seemed to be a way to solve having too much stuffing left over.

But to my point, stuffing is just bread  and it just goes against my grain to serve bread and potatoes in the same meal.  And if I serve potatoes, do I serve the sweet potatoes or yams or mashed or scalloped?  If I serve stuffing, do I have to have rolls or other kinds of bread on the table, too?  Too much of the same stuff, I think.

Maybe it depends on what you grew up with on Thanksgiving, but I cautiously announced that I was abandoning stuffing this year in favor of bigger-flavored potatoes, mashed with lots of garlic, butter, sour cream and horseradish.  Yum!  However, my diners protested mightily, about how much they love stuffing and wouldn't it be wrong to not have a potato dish?

So, I'm scanning the stuffing recipes.  I could do the beloved basic that I woke up to every November morning before the Macy's Day Parade:  sauteed onions and celery, mixed with dried white bread, broth and eggs, seasoned with sage and pepper and salt.  Just a basic stuffing that always tasted the same (except we cooked it inside the bird, so it had extra fat and flavor).  I tried cornbread once with cranberries and pecans, but that didn't go over well.  Another year was the oysters, yet another crumbled sausage in a hearty peasant bread mix. 

But my diners want the traditiional, the one they have gobbled up year after year.  And I, their dutiful chef, will appease them once again.  But I will be a little subversive and add some new dishes to my table, like a Tuscan cauliflower, a spinach and gorgonzola salad and a pumpkin-caramel cake, instead of...pie.  No, wait, I have to have pie, they say.  Hey, why not both?!