Mom Buckley's Filling

Ingredients
 

• 10 pounds of potatoes
• 1 bunch of celery
• 5 bags of pre-cubed filling bread
• 2 pounds of butter
• 2 1/2 dozen eggs
• 1/2 gallon milk
• 3 large onions
   

Directions

1. Peel potatoes and cut into quarters.
2. Boil potatoes in very salty water until soft.
3. Mash the potatoes.  I use a hand-held mixer and mash them in the pot that I boiled them in.  Do not use any milk in this step.
4. Cut ends off of celery and peel the skin off of it.
5. Dice the celery.
6. Peel the skin off of 3 large onions and dice them as well.
7. Boil the onions and celery in maybe ¼ to ½ inch of water.  You do not want to use a lot of water in this step.  You want them to be soft, but not mushy.
8. Add onion/celery mixture to mashed potatoes and mix.
9. In a large pan (I like to use a wok) add a good chunk of butter and let melt under medium to high heat.
10. Add about 1/3 to ½ of a bag of cubed bread.
11. Mix/sitr often, letting the bread soak up the butter.  Keep adding butter until all of the bread is coated and has reduced slightly.
12. In a bowl, add two eggs and some milk to make a scrambled egg mixture. 
13. Pour the egg mixture over the buttered bread in the pan, and stir until all of the bread is covered with the egg mixture and the egg takes on a scrambled egg texture
14. Dump the egged/buttered bread in the potatoes and mix.
15. Repeat this step until all 5 bags of bread are finished.
16. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Tips

• Using very salty water to boil the potatoes will reduce the amount of salt that you have to add for taste in the end.  10 lbs is a lot of potatoes to salt.
• Boil potatoes and onion/celery mixture at the same time in different pots to save time.
• I believe that I used about a half of a stick of butter for each pan of bread.  That works out to 16 half sticks of butter (2 lbs, 4 sticks/lb.) and 15 pans of bread (5 bags, 1/3 of a bag at a time)
• Stir the bread mixture very often while it is in the pan.  You don’t want a burnt taste on the bread, or it will very much affect the taste of the final product.
• It is much easier to mix all of the ingredients in the end by hand, but make sure you let the potatoes cool for a while, because they hold a lot of heat.  You will burn your hand otherwise.
• This will make enough to fill an oversized crockpot, or a regular sized crockpot with enough left over to stuff a turkey.