By Tanya Manus

I recently was a guest at an imaginative cocktail party, and all the guests were raving about what was in the martini glasses.
It wasn’t alcohol. It was mashed potatoes.
The menu for the party included heavy hors d’oeuvres and a mashed potato bar. Each guest could take a martini glass and fill it with mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes and a variety of toppings. The results looked like weird, wonderful sundaes, and they were delicious. I think this idea would be great fun for Thanskgiving, especially if you’re serving a buffet dinner.

To set up your own mashed potato bar, you’ll need:
Mashed potatoes
Mashed sweet potatoes
Brown gravy
Chicken or turkey gravy
Assorted toppings: Cooked bacon chopped into small pieces, shredded cheese, chopped green onions, sour cream or toppings of your choice

Provide a bowl or glass for each guest, and let each assemble a mashed potato “sundae” with the ingredients of his or her choice. Enjoy!

By Tanya Manus

It’s time to revisit a retro classic - deviled eggs.

We had a potluck the other day to wish our departing reporter Jeremy Fugleberg farewell, and the assembled foods, like our staff, was diverse. There was vegan fare next to little smokies, apples with homemade caramel dip, tator tot casserole, Boston cream and fruit pie. And a lot more. But the item on the menu that really sparked a conversation was the deviled eggs.

They disappeared quickly, as co-workers talked about how seldom this perennial favorite actually appears at potlucks and picnics anymore, despite the fact that deviled eggs have been so beloved that they inspired legions of deviled-egg trays just for serving them.

I confess I did recently try to throw away my friend’s deviled egg trays during her recent move. She surely didn’t use them, did she? But she said yes, she did, because she is the deviled-egg maker for her family at holidays and special occasions.

The next time you’re asked to bring a dish to a picnic or barbecue, get out your deviled egg tray - or borrow your friend’s - and revisit this classic. Your dish could be the talk of the party.

Easy Classic Deviled Eggs  (courtesy of the American Egg Board)

6 hard-cooked eggs

1/3 cup shredded taco-seasoned cheese OR Cheddar cheese

1/4 cup mayonnaise

1/4 sour cream

3 tbsp. green onions

Cut eggs lengthwise in half. Remove yolks to small bowl. Reserve whites. Mash yolks with fork. Add cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream and green onions; mix well. Spoon 1 heaping tablespoon of the yolk mixture into each egg white half. Refrigerate, covered, to blend flavors. Before serving, garnish eggs with chopped chives or minced green onions.

Helpful hints: Combine egg yolks, cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream and green onions in 1-quart plastic food-storage bag. Press out air and seal bag. Press and roll bag with hand until mixture is well blended. Push filling toward bottom corner of bag. Snip off about 1/2-inch of corner. Squeeze yolk mixture from bag into egg whites.

Picnic, barbecue or tailgate tip: Prepare filling in plastic bag, as above. Carry whites and yolk mixture separately in cooler. Fill eggs on the spot, pressing filling out of snipped corner of bag.

By Tanya Manus

We’ve probably all got cookbooks that are like old friends - we know that when we need a tried-and-true recipe, we’ll find it there.
One of the favorites in my collection is a self-published cookbook, “Home Cooking is a Family Affair,” that I got years ago after I interviewed the book’s author. A Southern cook transplanted to Arizona, she’d grown tired of trying to keep track of years’ worth of recipe cards for her family favorites, so she assembled all the recipes in a cookbook, threw out her recipe cards, and published enough copies of the book to give to family and friends.
This home cook’s sense of humor shines through in recipes for Elephant Stew and Fried Skunk. But there are plenty of good, practical recipes that she’d used for years while her children were growing up.

I revisit this book every once in awhile, and this week, I tried her recipe for Hamburger and Potato Boats. Although the recipe calls for baking the potatoes for an hour, I used those plastic-wrapped potatoes that are ready for the microwave and eliminated a lot of the preparation time. This turned out to be a tasty weeknight meal that I will definitely make again.
Hamburger and Potato Boats
4 large baking potatoes
4 slices bacon
1 pound ground beef
3 green onions, sliced thinly
1-1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tbsp. butter
1/4 cup grated Cheddar or American cheese
Bake potatoes in 400 degree oven for 1 hour or until tender. Saute bacon until crisp and drain on paper towels. Pour off all the drippings from pan. Mix ground beef lightly with green onions and shape into a large patty. Brown 5 minutes on each side and break into chunks. Stir in 1/2 tsp. salt, sour cream and crumbled bacon. Remove from heat. Split potatoes in half lengthwise and scoop out centers, being careful not to break shells. Place shells in a small baking pan. Mash potatoes and beat in remaining salt, butter and just enough milk to make them creamy. Spoon beef mixture into shells, evenly topping with mashed potatoes, and sprinkle with cheese. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Another of my favorites from this book is Dirty Rice. Once a year, my church has a huge potluck and entertainment night, and Dirty Rice is a terrific addition to the buffet table because it feeds a lot of people.
Vickie’s Dirty Rice
2 pounds lean ground beef
2 pounds lean ground pork
1 cup diced yellow onions
1 cup diced green onions
1/2 cup diced bell peppers
1/4 cup garlic, preferably ground
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
4 bay leaves
1 tsp. black pepper
2 cups chopped celery
2 cups cream of mushroom soup
3 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1/2 pound butter or margarine
In heavy pot, mix all meats together with 2 cups water on medium heat. Add all seasonings and vegetables at the start of the cooking. Cook over medium heat approximately 4 hours. Stir often! Then add the cream of mushroom soup and continue cooking for about 30 minutes. Boil 4 cups long grain rice until completely cooked. After rice has cooked, mix with the meat and seasonings. Allow to cook on low heat for about 30 minutes before serving. Serves 10.

By Tanya Manus

Who doesn’t love the semi-homemade craze?

A few store-bought ingredients, some creativity, and you end up with food that looks and tastes homemade, but cuts down on the time you spend cooking.

Cake mixes are great starters for semi-homemade treats. And just because the box says you’ve bought a cake mix, you don’t have to use it for cake.

Recently, when I was getting ready to entertain a group of friends, I was trying to find something different to serve. Usually, at our weekly gatherings, we take turns bringing dessert. I was rifling through my cupboards when I came across a box of Nana’s Apple Cake Mix from Tastefully Simple. I started with cake mix but ended up with a cobbler that left my friends raving. Rich and sweet, it was terrific paired with vanilla ice cream.

Cherry Cobbler

21 oz. can cherry pie filling (or any flavor pie filling you like)

1 box Nana’s Apple Cake Mix

1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter

Spread pie filling into greased 8- by 8-inch baking dish. Cut cake mix and butter together until mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle over pie filling. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 to 45 minutes. Serves 9.

Nana’s Cake Mix in particular is what gave the cherry cobbler its extra-good taste, but if you don’t have that in your pantry, try this recipe from Cooks.com.

Quick Cobbler

1 can of your favorite pie filling

1 stick butter

1 small box (enough for 1 layer) white, yellow or spice cake mix (such as Jiffy cake mix)

Pour pie filling into 1-quart casserole dish. Sprinkle cake mix over pie filling. Cut cold butter into pats and arrange over top. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 1 hour. Serve plain, with ice cream or whipped cream

P.S. We’d love to hear from you! What are some of your favorite recipes?

By Tanya Manus

It’s baby shower season - today I went to a shower to celebrate the upcoming birth of a co-worker’s baby, then arrived at home to find an e-mail announcing the arrival of a friend’s niece.

All these springtime parties and celebrations call for festive, mom-and-baby-friendly menus. For today’s shower, I took a basket of fresh, cut-up fruit accompanied by Creamy Coconut Dip. Lightly coconutty, this whipped concoction just nicely complemented an array of strawberries, bananas and pineapple.

This recipe is easy, but makes a lot! You’ll have plenty for your next party and some tasty snacking the next day, too.

Creamy Coconut Dip

1 (8 oz.) package cream cheese or neufchatel cheese, softened

15 oz. cream of coconut (you’ll find it in liquor department)

1 (8 oz.) tub Cool Whip, thawed

Beat cream cheese and and cream of coconut in large bowl with wire whisk until well blended. Add whipped topping; gently stir until well blended. Cover. Refrigerate for several hours or until chilled. If desired, garnish with toasted flaked coconut before serving.

Serve with fresh, cut-up fruit or graham crackers. Makes 48 (2 tbsp.) servings.

By Tanya Manus

A friend of mine and former Journal colleague is expecting a bouncing baby boy any minute now, so I’m helping her mother plan and host a baby shower this weekend.

We’ll be serving guests an array of hors d’oeuvres and a luscious chocolate-raspberry cake. But I didn’t want just any ordinary sherbet and 7-Up punch to go with the menu; my friend has more sophisticated, and healthful, tastes than that. And obviously, cocktails with alcohol are out of the question.

So I’ve opted for a fun, fruity “mocktail,” courtesy of Rachael Ray. It’s refreshing (try it on a hot summer day!), easy and festive - perfect for toasting the arrival of little David Alexander.

Mango-Ginger Mocktails
4 cups ginger ale, chilled
4 cups mango nectar, chilled
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice, plus lemon slices for garnish
Ice
  
Just before serving, mix together the ginger ale, mango nectar and lemon juice in a large pitcher. Pour into tall glasses filled with ice and garnish with lemon slices.

By Crystal Hohenthaner
Journal staff

My pastor will be having all the single young adults from our church over to his house next Friday and I offered to help with the food — and now I need the help of all of you creative foodies out there.

We have decided to have tacos for the main dish, which should be easy and we will be able to have some people bring a little something without actually cooking. You know, sour cream, salsa, shredded cheese, lettuce, tortillas and so on.

At first I thought this was a brilliant idea (because it was my idea), but now I find myself hard-pressed to think of any good sides. My mom has offered to whip up a batch of fiesta rice salad for the event — which will be great — but I can’t really think of any other mexican food that you wouldn’t just put on the tacos.

I’m thinking of things like guacamole and queso dip, but what else can we serve with the tacos? Oh, and I’m thinking we might want a good dessert to go along with it all too.

Help me people, I’ve got nothing.

By Jomay Steen

In an attempt to revisit the past and spark some fun memories, the women hosting a book club gathering last week surprised everyone with a “Back-to-School”-themed meal. With a world globe, cup of pencils, boxes of crayons and theme paper as the centerpiece, the women clustered individual sack lunches around the dining room table with the names of participants written on the sacks on the first day of school in the Rapid City School District.
“It’s like in the cafeteria lunchroom. If you don’t like what you’ve got, you can trade,” said Catherine Dimock, one of the geniuses behind the funky meal.
“We’re attempting to lower the bar,” said Margaret Skillman, co-conspirator and top-notch sandwich maker.
“It’s a way to break the ice,” said Pat Clanton Handel, who had created some truly mouth-watering appetizers that had initially hinted at a multi-coursed dinner.
Dimock, Skillman and Handel, all of Rapid City, had gotten together earlier to brainstorm sack lunch menus before agreeing on ham salad or peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, chips, carrots, Little Debbie cupcakes and a juice box. The eagle-eyed of the group were the first to notice the juice boxes were single-serve boxes of Cabernet—“found in Wyoming.” Everything inside the paper bags was swaddled in waxed paper or in its own cellophane wrapper.
These women are excellent cooks, who have lead legions of friends into new territories of culinary delight and foreign cuisine. Three months earlier, the entire club had been fed an English tea right out of the books of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Yet, they wanted to widen the culinary circle. The sacked meals also signaled to those of us who are less well-schooled in the kitchen to try a simple approach when entertaining a crowd.
“What a great idea,” chorused the crowd.
I traded my Doritos for Ruffles potato chips, but kept the ham salad on white sandwich. The phrase I often heard throughout the house was “I can’t remember the last time I ate white bread.” To me, it tasted like a tender piece of cake!
Opening that sack was like sitting down to a 1964 noontime meal at my wooden desk in a one-room schoolhouse called Turtle Creek. Inside that bag were foods that would sustain me throughout the day made by the woman who truly understood me better than I did.
So like these women demonstrated, don’t get overwhelmed by the logistics of a dinner party for friends. Feel free to tone it down a couple of notches because the point of the gathering is your friends and having a good time.

Catherine Dimock’s Faux Ham Salad
1 pound bologna, chunked
1/4 cup sweet pickle relish or to taste
1/2 cup mayonnaise or to taste
1 loaf white sandwich bread
In a bowl, mix bologna and sweet pickle relish. Fold in mayonnaise to moisten. Spread on slices of bread to make sandwiches. Store in refrigerator in sealed container for two days. Dimock had found ham to be too salty. She prefers using bologna while Skillman uses hotdogs when making this delicious spread.

Pat Clanton Handel’s Chutney Cheese Ball
8 ounces cream cheese softened
2 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cup chopped green onions
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup coarsely chopped dry roasted peanuts
1 cup chutney
1 cup coconut
Crackers
In a medium bowl, combine cream cheese and sour cream. Blend in curry powder. Add onions, raisins and peanuts and mix thoroughly. Form into a ball. Can be made four days ahead, but flavors will intensify. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Roll in coconut. Pour chutney over top and serve with crackers.

Lila’s Incredible Tuna Salad Sandwich
2 (6 ounce) cans tuna
1-2 hard-boiled eggs
1 rib celery, minced (about 1/4 cup)
2 tablespoons sweet or red onion, minced
2 tablespoons dill pickles or sweet gherkins, minced
3/4 cup Miracle Whip
8 slices whole wheat bread
Open cans, drain well. Break up clumps of tuna using a fork until it has a fine and even texture. Put tuna in medium bowl and mix in celery, onion and pickles. Fold in Miracle Whip until mixture is evenly moistened. Salad can be kept in covered container in the refrigerator for up to three days. Spread salad on bread, cover with remaining slices for sandwiches. Recipe yields 2 cups. Serves 4

By Tanya Manus

A co-worker of mine, who says she comes from a long line of good potluck cooks, knew exactly what to bring when I invited her to my Fourth of July party - Pretzel Jell-O Salad.

Well, OK, her recipe calls it salad. I call it dessert. With a crust made of butter, sugar and pretzels, topped with a cream cheese layer and fruit and Jell-O, it’s too decadent to be salad. I know I had heard of this recipe before but I’d never tried it. But one bite of this crunchy, sweet, salty, creamy treat and I was hooked.

This dessert is light and refreshing, perfect for summer. The next time you need to take a dish to a barbecue or a potluck, try this. You’ll get lots of compliments! 

Pretzel Jell-O Dessert

Step 1:

1-1/2 to 2 cups crushed pretzels
1 stick of butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar

½ tsp. cinnamon (optional)
Mix together and press into bottom of 13×9 pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 6 minutes. Allow to cool.

Step 2:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened

8 ounces Cool Whip, thawed
1/2 cup sugar
Whip together ingredients and spread on top of pretzel mixture. Put in refrigerator until completely set (at least an hour).

Step 3:
Large package fruit flavored Jell-O (your choice - 6 oz box)
10 ounces (approximately) FROZEN fruit, same flavor as Jell-O (strawberries or raspberries are best)
2 cups boiling water
Dissolve Jell-O in boiling water. Put frozen fruit into bowl and allow to thicken. Once thick, pour on top of cream cheese/pretzel combination. Refrigerate until set. (You want the Jell-O to thicken first so the fruit doesn’t all float to the top - but it’s still good, even if it does).

Garlic, how can it taste so good but make your breath smell so bad?

I brought in some dip to work today. Tastefully Simple Garlic, Garlic dip. It tastes awesome. But I only had one bite — two hours ago – and my breath smells bad now. Really bad. So bad that I can smell it!

All the experts say that smell and taste are definitly linked. But in that case, how can something that tastes so good make your breath smell so bad? Onions are the same story. And vinegar. In fact, my friend Jackie made me dinner a few weeks back and she concocted a sherry vinegar and onion sauce for the meal.

As soon as I stepped into her apartment I was afraid. In fact I was regretting the fact that I had said yes to her cooking me dinner. The entire apartment smelled kind of pickled — because of the sherry vinegar in the sauce.

At first I thought the apartment smelled funny because, well she has a male roommate and young men are just notorious for being bad house-keepers and a little smelly to boot. But when I realized that the smell permeating the place was actually the food that Jackie expected me to eat I was afraid.

I briefly tried to think of a bunch of excuses that might allow me to go home. I had nothing. I was going to have to eat it. So we sat at the table, prepared our plates and as I lifted the fork to my mouth to take the first bite I was getting ready to fake a polite response.

But it was actually great! I enjoyed the meal and even got over the smell. That is until I left the apartment. The smell had permeated my clothes. Kind of like when you eat at Subway and when you leave you smell like bread for a couple of days. I hate that. And how is it that the scent of baking bread smells disgusting when it’s in your hair or t-shirt?

Anyway, after my garlic, garlic breath I just had to go on about how smell and taste baffle me.