Oklahoma and Utah

 
Well, Oklahoma made it easy to decide what to make - they have a state meal!   It's really too much food for one meal though: fried okra, squash, cornbread, barbecue pork, biscuits, sausage and gravy, grits, corn, strawberries, chicken fried steak, pecan pie, and black-eyed peas.    We had company and made a subset of the meal for dinner.   We served pulled pork, cornbread, biscuits, grits, strawberries and black-eyed peas (plus salad and a veggie side dish that guests contributed). 

All of what we made was very good, but not interesting enough to post the recipes.   The only one worth mentioning is how we made the pulled pork.   Since there's about 2 feet of snow on the deck where our grill lives, we cheated and made it in the crockpot.  All you do is put pork tenderloin in a crockpot, cover it with rootbeer, and cook it on low all day!   Then drain the rootbeer, shred the pork, and add barbecue sauce.   The first time we made it that way, it was really great.  This time it was a little too rootbeer flavored because of the particular rootbeer that we used.   But I think we can adjust the barbecue sauce to make it better.   It certainly wins points for easy.

And then there's Utah.   Anyone know what the most popular dish in Utah is?  It seems to be Jello.   No joke.   Noone in our household likes Jello, but since we were having company I made some anyway.   It actually mostly disappeared!   So I guess more people like it than we think.   In addition to the Jello, Utah's saving grace is that they have an official state cooking pot- the dutch oven.  That was something we could work with.  


For dessert, we made peach dump cake in the dutch oven.   Dump cake is a great camping dish.   All you do is put two 14.5oz cans of fruit or pie filling in the bottom of a dutch oven.   Sprinkle a white or yellow cake mix over the top (don't add anything to it - just use the plain mix).   Finally, dot the top with buttter, place on the lid, and bake (in campfire coals or a 350 oven) for about 45 minutes.   It comes out like cobbler and is actually pretty tasty.   I find the pie filling too sweet, so we usually use canned fruit.  If you want to try it for a small group, use one can of fruit or pie filling and a single layer cake mix (such as Jiffy or Martha Washington brands) and bake it in a covered casserole dish.

Arizona & New Mexico

Yum!   Great states to cook from.  Although I'm sure the residents of both states would tell us that their foods aren't exactly the same, they are similar enough that it is hard to say which of the two states our recipes are from.  Both are what we consider "Southwestern" cooking, heavily influenced by Mexican cooking. 

There are so many good recipes in this category, it was hard to decide what to make, but we finally landed on homemade flour tortillas and Chile Verde Con Cerdo (pork with green chiles).   The tortillas were actually very easy to make, though a bit time consuming since we had to cook them one at a time in our lone cast iron skillet.   Next time I think we'll try doing some in a regular non-stick frying pan as well so that we can cook two at a time.   Anyway, the resulting tortillas were soft and fresh.   DD declared them "awesome".    The recipe we used is available at http://www.cooking-mexican-recipes.com/flour_tortilla_recipe.html.

The Chile Verde was a good multi-person recipe since there was a lot of chopping and sauteing involved.   It was helpful to have all 3 of us  doing the prep and the cooking.   The stew was supposed to simmer for at least an hour so we started early, got it on the stove, and then had time to do other things for awhile while enjoying the tantalizing smell!   It was a big hit - definitely a great area of the country for good food!  The recipe we used is available at http://www.food.com/recipe/chile-verde-con-cerdo-green-chili-with-pork-20574.   If we make it again, we will probably make half the recipe - it makes a ton.  

Alaska & Hawaii

Tonight was our first night cooking foods from across the U.S.   When you think of Alaska & food, salmon is the obvious choice.   Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 cooks weren't too excited about having salmon for dinner.   So we cheated and had hot smoked salmon (store bought) as an appetizer.   It was yummy :-).   We also made sourdough pancakes for breakfast.   They were ok, but I don't think they were good enough to post the particular recipe that we used.  BTW - other foods from Alaska would be halibut, reindeer, moose, bear and caribou.  We decided to skip on those too...

There are lots of other food choices for Hawaii:  poi, Hawaiian shave ice, macadamia nuts.  We needed an entree though, so we made fried rice with pineapple and ham.   We all liked it!  Definitely a better choice than Alaskan moose.

 

Next week, on to Arizona!

Introduction

It's winter in New England and we're spending more time indoors. We've decided on a family project to keep us all entertained and having a good time together. Once a week, we will cook together. But not just any old food, we are going to work on cooking our way across the United States!

The first discussion - where to start? Allie suggested in order of when the states joined the Union, which makes sense. However, after doing some quick research on what to make to represent Delaware, the first state, we came up blank! Even an email to a friend that went to college in Delaware didn't turn up anything interesting. Yikes!

The quick & dirty solution - start in backwards order :-). So this week we will be cooking/eating foods from Alaska & Hawaii. See the next post to hear about what we make!