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.