Gearing Up For Thanksgiving

This year we are joining a large group of friends for Thanksgiving, and I have volunteered to bring stuffing.  Besides being the only traditional "Thanksgiving" food that I'm truly confident of, it's probably the only one we can make "legally."  Since we're going to someone else's house, the actual meal will fall under our "when in Rome...." exception, which is basically that we can eat what is served at someone else's home, provided we don't abuse it--such as having a soda or something.  However, I do feel obligated to make sure that what I take is legal, so I have been making bread in the bread machine

to use as my stale bread, and it's now sitting out getting "stale"

And incidentally, 3 pounds of bread is a LOT of bread.

To be honest, I usually make the bread to use for stuffing as it's such a HUGE percentage of the end product.  Not that I have ever made the bread by hand--let's not get stupid here.  But some sort of bread with an actual flavor adds a lot to the stuffing.  This year I'm using a polenta-whole wheat bread--and for bread machine bread it's really quite good. 

I was hoping to be able to buy some commercial chicken stock, but even the "organic" variety has something called "autolyzed yeast extract," which violates our "unknown ingredients" rule.  Even without that, it would have been a bit sketchy anyway, because the ingredients list includes "natural" flavors, which we have learned just means the additive occurs in NATURE.  It doesn't mean it naturally occurs in CHICKEN.  We learned that the hard way with cheese.  In America, many cheeses are orange....which is sort of odd as milk is white and butter is at best yellow, so the orange color doesn't come naturally.  BUT, cheese can claim to be "all natural" even when it is an improbable shade of orange because it is colored with annatto, which is derived from a tropical plant which does exist in nature, though it has nothing whatever to do with cheese.  So, after having many unintended "cheats," we have caught on and UNLESS IT LISTS EVERY SINGLE DARN THING THAT WAS ADDED, we write it off as "illegal."

At the rate we're going, we're going to be down to just celery by the 31st........