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Stuffing is generally seen as a Thanksgiving tradition, and we know very few people who bother with it at any other time of year, ourselves included. What a damn shame. Now is the time for stuffing, it turns out, while the markets are full of fresh figs and local sweet potatoes. The figs add so much flavor to this stuffing, added in raw at the very end. The sweet potatoes add richness and pull up the figs' sweetness to a level we prefer, and the texture of the wild rice is the perfect foil for the rest.
We must confess that stuffing is a misnomer, as we never stuffed this stuffing into anything but our bellies. What of it? The best Thanksgiving stuffings are usually those cooked outside of the bird.
Fig, Sweet Potato, and Wild Rice Stuffing
3 sweet potatoes
1/2 lb wild rice
1 pint fresh black mission figs, chopped into 1/2" chunks
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp butter
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Rinse the sweet potatoes and poke holes in them with a fork, then wrap them each separately in aluminum foil and bake at 375°F until tender (45-60 minutes). Once they're ready, unwrap them and let them cool just enough to be able to peel them and chop them into 1/2" chunks.
Boil plenty of salted water, add in the wild rice, and gently boil, covered, until tender (45-60
minutes). Drain and set aside.
Heat the butter in a pan and cook the garlic in it over medium heat, stirring often, until crispy.
stir all ingredients together and add salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.
Serve with roast chicken and gravy for best effect.
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Fresh figs are great, but I want to promote the virtues of dried figs in stuffings - If you like them a bit sweeter as your comments suggest; if you want them to hold more substance through cooking; if you value their capacity to blend deeply with other flavors, if you enjoy the immunity from seasonal constraint, and if the price advantage are of interest - you're a candidate for the great dried fig conversion.
I had occasion once to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner where the assembled guests presented a challenging collection of food allergies. Not allowed to use any wheat (or other gluten containing grain), denied nuts, seeds, and all related oils, and cut off from eggs.
My recollection is that I started down this road because I wanted to make butifarras with fig sauce in the manner of tapas restaurant Dali in Cambridge, MA. Given that and the allergies, here's where I ended up...
Dried turkish figs soaked in (lots of) Lustau East India Solera for a few days;
Homemade butifarras (spanish-style tapas sausage flavored with the figgy sherry, Vietnamese cassia cinnamon, fresh ground nutmeg, Ceylon clove and native garlic);
Homemade flourless cornbread;
And probably some butter sauteed onions, shallots or both, I forget.
We also repeated the spice signature (minus garlic) from the sausage in a housemade mango-orange-cranberry chutney we served.
Needless to say, the turkey was not seasoned in the traditional way - but rather to tie in with the above.
We seldom repeat anything around here - but this one has been called back for encores twice.