Comfort Food Ham and Potato Casserole

This old recipe is a family favorite. It is a great way to use up leftover ham from the holiday dinner.

Ingredients:
4 lbs Ore-Ida® cubed potatoes O'Brien (2 32 oz packages)
1 1/2 cup mayonnaise (not salad dressing)
1 1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup Hidden Valley Ranch dressing (from the bottle - not the dry powder)
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 1/2 teaspoon Johnny's season salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
5-6 green onions chopped
1 1/2 cup white onion chopped
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese or colby jack
4 cups chopped cooked ham

Directions:

• Butter the inside of your slow cooker.
• First dump one bag of potatoes out of the plastic bag into a microwave safe dish. Microwave each bag of the potatoes for 5 minutes
• Then dump in the mayonnaise and sour cream.
• Sprinkle the seasonings over the sour cream and mayonnaise and mix together very well.
• Stir in the green onions and the chopped white onion.
• Add the potatoes and ham and mix everything together very well.
• Turn the slow cooker to high and cook for 4 hours or cook on low 8 hours.
• A few minutes before you serve dinner, stir in the cheddar cheese.

Options: Bake in a buttered casserole dish. 350 degrees for approximately 30 minutes - just until it's hot. Be sure to pre-heat the potatoes, just as you do for the slow cooker.

You can make this casserole the day before and refrigerate.

Johnny's seasoning salt is widely available in the Pacific Northwest. If it's not available in your area, it is available through the website: Johnny's Seasoning, Sam's Club, Costco, Amazon.com, and you can even purchase it on ebay. If you must, you can substitute Lawry's or another seasoning salt.

By the way, Johnny's garlic spread is the best! I use it to season my wood smoke grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, and linguine primavera. Sometimes I even use it for my garlic bread!

Let's Talk Turkey

Don't you love Thanksgiving! Okay, so that's more of a statement, than a question. But I seriously love the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Family, friends, football, food... turkey! Yummmm!

I've cooked a lot of turkey over the years, but it seems like nearly every time I get ready to cook a turkey, I end up searching online for a great new recipe. Here is a list of some of my favorite turkey websites.

Nesco - my favorite! The turkeys I have roasted in my nesco are always moist! Not always perfectly brown... but oh so yummy! Nesco Recipes - do a search for turkey in the nesco roaster and you'll find the instructions for roasting a turkey in your nesco. You can roast up to a 20 lb bird in the 18 quart nesco roaster.

Rotisserie Turkey - I LOVE turkey roasted on my George Foreman rotisserie. I simply use the instruction manual recipe that came with my George Foreman. The George Foreman rotisserie isn't for a large turkey, so don't plan on it for a big family gathering.

Martha Stewart has several really good basic recipes. The classic stuffing is one of my favorite recipes. I've cooked her 'perfect turkey' and it turned out wonderful. During the holidays, she has the link to her turkey recipes right on the front page, but during the off months, you'll need to go to Martha's website and do a search for turkey recipes.

Butterball - the butterball turkey website can be impossible to get into on Thanksgiving morning. Don't wait till the last day to figure out how to bake your turkey. You can call them Call 1-800-Butterball or you can go to the website to look up tips, recipes, and if you can't find what you are looking for, you can even email them.

Norbest is a wonderful website with information about picking out a turkey, thawing your bird, cooking the perfect holiday bird, whole birds, boneless turkey, and bone in turkey breast. Not only will you find recipes and cooking tips, you'll find a whole section of the website with facts - history of agriculture, trivia, US turkey production, etc...

Jenie-O has information on buying, cooking, stuffing, marinating, rubbing, how-to carve, safely handle, and store left over turkey.


This year seems to be the year for brined turkey. I haven't given that method a try as of yet, but I'm going to look at the recipes on the food network and try out one or two of the recipes early this next year. Until then, I'm not giving any links, since I don't know anything about it first hand.

Berry Red Cranberry Sauce

Berry Red Cranberry Sauce:

• 1 bag of cranberries.
• 1 cup of cran-raspberry juice
• 1 cup of sugar

Directions:

Stir the sugar into the juice in a heavy sauce pan. Heat and stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Bring it up to a boil. Stir in the cranberries. Simmer for 10 minutes. Stir often. You'll hear the cranberries popping. It's sort of cool to see them pop like that. After you simmer it for 10 minutes cool in the refrigerator before serving.

***personal note*** I sometimes serve it warm and it is wonderful! Using the red juice makes this really red cranberry sauce. It's beautiful!