In her somewhat annual Thanksgiving message to barfblog.com, Michéle Samarya-Timm of the Somerset County Department of Health, NJ, gets stuffed.

At Thanksgiving, if conversation isn’t about the bird, it’s about the stuffing: in the bird, or outside the bird? I teach food safety to a variety of folks, so my stance on this stays consistent…outside and 165 F.

Attendees at my food safety class last week brought up a refreshingly different question….does it matter what the stuffing is made of?

I know the barfblog guys are particular about stuffing; Doug wrote about it last Thanksgiving. His refrigerator potpourri technique sounds tasty…a gourmet mélange of basic ingredients. Call it barfblog’s Best Thanksgiving Stuffing, if you will. But this recipe has competition.

Cookbooks and websites are chock-full of the best-ever stuffing recipes with subtle twists on traditional ingredients. Using bread? Options are endless: Cornbread, multi-grain whole-wheat, sourdough, rye, bagels, and the ever-popular squishy white Wonder Bread.

Not a bread person? How about a rice stuffing? You can choose from white, wild, saffron, risotto, or last night’s leftover steamed. It’s easy to see how basic substitutions have expanded the variations for grandma’s recipe.

The advent of processed foods managed to usher in some more kitschy offerings, that surprisingly have cult followings: Corn Flakes stuffing (featured this morning on NPR), Ritz Cracker stuffing, or even White Castle hamburger stuffing.

I began to wonder about alternate approaches to this traditional side dish. I’ve heard of stuffing made with items such as sausage, lobster, clams, chestnuts, pine nuts, zucchini, or bacon.

These can all be personalized marks of a creative cook. In addition, I recall many times in my own kitchen when I needed to get inventive for lack of an essential ingredient. So I might be able to understand why there is a recipe for popcorn stuffing. What surprised me were the more unique renditions of this holiday classic that could make a Thanksgiving one to remember:

Didn’t have time for breakfast this morning? No problem – you can make stuffing from oatmeal, grits, grape nuts or captain crunch.

Don’t like the taste of turkey? Pair it with stuffing made college-style with pizza…or Italian style with prosciutto, salami and pepperoni …or man-style with steak and bacon.

For a multi-cultural twist, try tortilla chip stuffing, lasagna stuffing, or a mofongo mix – a Puerto Rican specialty of fried green plantains mashed up with bacon, sofrito and olive oil.

You could consider the epicurean dish turducken (a chicken stuffed into a duck, which itself is stuffed into a turkey) as the ultimate in stuffing options…or is it?

I pondered…is there anything edible that can’t be cooked as stuffing?

I tried searching for the strangest options, and uncovered stuffing recipes containing alligator, applesauce, chocolate (now that may be onto something), peanut butter, Twinkies and donuts.

Devil Dogs, cookies, pop tarts, matzos, malted milk balls -- you can pretty much put anything in; if it’s edible it can be made into stuffing.

The key is not the ingredients so much as the food safety. You can make stuffing from homemade cornbread, marshmallow peeps, bologna or rutabaga, so long as you cook it thoroughly and check it with a probe thermometer. 165 F kills a whole host of common pathogens. Kill the pathogens, not your guests.

Stuffing isn’t evil; cooking it incorrectly is.

Thankful for all those who keep our families, our food supply, and our country safe.

 I’ve got turkeys wandering around the yard but I can’t buy one at the grocer or butcher.

Paul the butcher in Annerley, Brisbane, Australia, took pity on me and gave me – gave me for free – a frozen turkey breast he had in his freezer.

“If it sucks, throw it out.”

I threw it out.

Paul says he does a lot of turkeys for Christmas, but Thanksgiving just isn’t an Australian thing.

And it’s sorta weird, with spring strawberries and asparagus abundant rather than the traditional North American harvest foods.

Was even weirder prepping food all morning while Amy played with Sorenne and listened to the K-State football game on Internet radio.

But, we continued our tradition and had some 15 Aussies over for a Canadian Thanksgiving feast.

And instead of North American football, there was the 2011 Rugby World Cup quarterfinals: yeah Wales (suck it Ireland); France will lose next weekend to Wales; yeah Australia (suck it South Africa), and in a few hours it should be yeah New Zealand (suck it Argentina).

Details are trickling out about the death of Jasper County, Missouri, resident from E. coli last week.

The Joplin Globe reports this morning that a food or a beverage served at a Thanksgiving dinner is the apparent source of an E. coli outbreak that killed a 51-year-old Carthage woman and sickened several other people.

Tony Moehr, director of the Jasper County Health Department, said,

“We have two confirmed cases of E. coli O157:H7 in Jasper County. One of the cases resulted in a death.”

Moehr said a third confirmed case of the bacterial infection has been reported in Dade County and involves someone who attended the Thanksgiving dinner.

“It appears the cases are related to a family gathering for Thanksgiving on Nov. 27,” he said. “We have identified seven or eight additional illnesses related to that gathering, but we don’t have the test results back for them. These cases occurred around the same period of time but were not as severe.”

It is believed that 11 of the 24 people who attended the event became ill.

The department, Moehr said, did not issue a press release about the E. coli death because the incident was associated with a family gathering and did not pose a threat to the public.

Une récente éclosion de maladies d’origine alimentaire au Kansas touchant 159 personnes a été liée à un dîner au cours duquel de la dinde a été servie dans une église. Les symptômes comprenaient vomissements, diarrhées et crampes abdominales – un vrai cadeau de fête. Aucun aliment particulier n’a été identifié.

Les repas de fêtes ont été liés à des éclosions de nombreux pathogènes, tels que Salmonella, Campylobacter, Clostridium perfringens et Staphylococcus aureus. La cuisson pour un nombre de personnes plus grand que de coutume, soit à la maison ou dans une cuisine collective, peut conduire à des erreurs au détriment de la sécurité des aliments.

Que pouvez-vous faire ?

Nettoyer et désinfecter les ustensiles et les surfaces de travail après avoir préparé la dinde crue pour le rôtissage. Lavez-vous les mains après avoir manipulé de la viande crue ou de la volaille. Ne lavez pas votre dinde. Des recherches récentes ont montré que lors du lavage de la volaille, les agents pathogènes peuvent se propager un mètre autour de l'évier, ce qui pourrait inclure des plats déjà préparés.

La couleur n'est pas un indicateur de sécurité ou de cuisson. Souvent il y a des suggestions dans les recettes au sujet de la dinde comme « le jus doit être clair ». C'est un mythe. La seule façon de savoir si la dinde est cuite est d’utiliser un thermomètre digital à une sonde sensible et lire au moins 74°C. Piquer la sonde en plusieurs points mais soyez sûr que le thermomètre ne touche pas les os car cela peut donner une mauvaise lecture de la température.

Conserver au réfrigérateur les restes de dinde dans les deux heures après la sortie du four. La dinde devrait être refroidie à 5°C rapidement. Le mieux est de mettre les restes de dinde en tranches dans des sacs refermables d’un litre ou de plus petite taille. Les sacs doivent être entreposés à plat au réfrigérateur pour permettre à l'air froid de circuler. Certaines bactéries formant des spores vont croître et former des toxines si elles sont conservées à température ambiante trop longtemps.

Pour plus d’information contactez Ben Chapman, benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu ou Doug Powell, dpowell@ksu.edu