This funeral potatoes recipe is easy to make for a creamy, cheesy potato side dish. You can add anything you like to jazz this casserole up. You can use potato chips, tortilla chips, or even cornflakes for the topping. I like to use sour cream and onion potato chips.
On a recent trip to the grocery store with my mom, we grabbed a jar of peanuts to help stave off our snacking cravings since dinner was right around the corner. When we got back to my house, I stashed the jar in a kitchen cabinet without a second thought.
Opening the cabinet to find an ingredient for dinner that night, I did start to have second thoughts on the best place to store that open jar of peanuts. We know where to store grated Parmesan cheese, sliced bread, and peanut butter, but what about raw nuts?
We reached out to the experts for the answer, but before we dive into the best place to store nuts, let’s take a quick look at their history of human consumption.
Was anyone else raised in a household that would go through five pounds of bacon in two days? Let me preface this with saying that I was the only child during this time, so having multiple mouths to feedcouldn’t even justify this usage. My mother just loved bacon, and it was always in the house. So naturally, I’ve become an expert at pan frying it, and even microwaving it. I didn’t start using the method of baking until I was in college, and thank goodness because it saves me so much time and energy. I also do not have to worry about bacon grease burning my skin.
Although the oven is a convenient way to cook bacon, I was always told it would not be as crispy as frying it in a pan. The crispness of bacon is super important. You expect that texture when eating it with pancakes or even on a BLT. One deli I worked at took it to the next level and would deep fry the bacon for its famous BLT sandwiches. Well, move over deep fryer, because I am here to defend the use of an oven.
We’ve seen claims to the crispiest baked bacon thanks to hacks all over social media—like coating the bacon in flour, adding water to the baking pan, baking it on a rack, etc. So I decided to find out once and for all the absolute best way to get the crispiest bacon from the oven.
While its name might sound unappetizing, the “dump dinner” is a thing of beauty: Take ingredients, dump them into your cooking vessel, set a timer, and walk away until the timer goes off. And dinner is served. Plus if you’re feeling like spending less time in the kitchen, opt for ingredients that will save you more time on prep—things like a jar of minced garlic, pre-diced onion, herb paste, pre-made meatballs, or cooked rotisserie chicken. Lean into the laziness, guilt-free, with these fabulously low-maintenance dump dinners!
My entire childhood, my mom made The Dip. Every Super Bowl party, birthday, potluck, you name it–my mom showed up with a bowl of her “famous” dip in tow. It was my favorite thing she made, and I would even request an entire salty, tangy batch for myself on my birthday. So imagine my horror as a preteen, watching my mom prep her famous dip for the first time and realizing it was just Lipton French onion soup mix and sour cream. That’s it. I assumed it included a laundry list of ingredients and required some super special mom-only technique to achieve such deliciousness. It turns out that I just really like French onion soup mix, which never appeared in any recipe in my mom’s arsenal save for The Dip, so I had no idea that was the culprit.
Once I got to college, I was cooking all my meals by myself for the first time. Armed with a college student’s budget and the knowledge that French onion soup mix makes things delicious, I stumbled upon a creation I still eat more than a decade later: French onion mac and cheese.
Book Reviews by the Reluctant Retiree 