Strawberry Holiday Salad

Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, our family has a pretty set menu: turkey, green beans, dressing, sweet potato casserole, and strawberry salad. Sometimes we jazz it up with biscuits or muffins. If we're feeling really adventurous, the green beans will become the green bean casserole that I've previously referenced. But for the most part, our menu is set. We've figured out what tastes good. Strawberry salad is our traditional pseudo-dessert. It gets served alongside everything else, so you can eat it as a side dish if you want, but pretty much everyone eats it as dessert. After a lot of rich food, it's sweet enough but not too sweet, and it satisfies everyone's urge for a palate cleanser after turkey and gravy. An hierloom recipe in our house, for good reason.


Strawberry Holiday Salad


2 boxes strawberry jello
1 box frozen strawberries (do not defrost)
2 mashed bananas (you can also slice the bananas if you like your bananas chunkier)
1 1/2 cup boiling water
1 small can crushed pineapple

Stir jello and water together until jello is dissolved in boiling water. Add frozen strawberries, stir until strawberries are all separated. Add pineapple and bananas. Pour into 3 qt pyrex  baking dish, refridgerate until set.

Serves: 6-8

Quick Sour Cream Rolls

These are addictively tasty, and they're fast to make. The one caution I would give is that they're buttery. So if you usually serve your biscuits in basket with a bread-cloth (this is how I was brought up, and is a staple for serving biscuits or muffins in the South), your bread-cloth may get stained with the butter in these rolls. So better to serve these with paper towels that can soak up any buttery residue instead of ruining a breadcloth on these tasty, tasty, TASTY rolls.



Quick Sour Cream Rolls

2 1/2 cups bisquick, DIVIDED (I always use bisquick, but you can use the biscuit mix of your choice)
8 oz sour cream
1/2 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350F.

Combine 2 cups of the biscuit mix with the sour cream and butter. Stir well. Place the rest of the biscuit mix into a small bowl, and use it to flour your hands as you roll out tablespoon-sized balls from the mixed dough. Use two lightly-greased muffin tins (VERY lightly greased, as in, I usually don't actually grease the muffin tins because I don't need to. But if you really want to grease your muffin tins, err on the side of VERY LIGHT), and deposit three balls of dough per muffin cup.

Bake at 350F for 15-20 min, or until tops of rolls are golden brown. Turn them out of the muffin tin, and serve immediately.

Serves: 4-5. The yield here is 1 dozen rolls (two muffin tins' worth), but I'll guarantee you that everyone you serve will eat at least two of these things.

Mom's Pork Chops

The 'mom' in the title is actually my grandmother, from whom this recipe comes. It's simple, but tastes good and makes a great accompaniment to mashed potatoes on a night when you don't want to spend that much time making dinner.


Mom's Pork Chops

3 bone-in pork chops (you can use 2 or 4, just one chop for each person you intend to serve)
1 tbsp butter
1 small sweet onion, diced
1 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp prepared yellow mustard (whole grain mustard also works, but I prefer a smooth kind)
1 cup chicken stock
1 tsp Worchestershire sauce
Salt
Pepper

Salt and pepper pork chops, then brown on both sides in butter over medium-high heat. Remove from pan. Using same pan and remaining butter, brown onion. Add next four ingredients, and stir to make a sauce. Add the pork chops back in, reduce to a simmer, and cook for 20 minutes. Serve pork chops immediately with gravy for rice or mashed potatoes.

Serves:2-4