Category: columns-food

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Autumn Pumpkin Bundt Cake

By Laura Johnson


Now that the weather has started to turn chilly, I’ve been thinking about the most important meal of the day. No, not breakfast. I’m talking about afternoon coffee. Even those of you who didn’t grow up on the Scandinavian five-meal-a-day plan can appreciate the pleasures of a hot cup of coffee, a nibble of sugary something, and most important of all, a good conversation. This mid-afternoon ritual was always observed at my grandmother’s house, but was especially important on those gray fall and winter days when we needed the extra caffeine, the warmth of the oven and a bit of bustling around the kitchen to perk us up. Each step of the process was its own pleasure, part of a work routine that dated as far back as I could remember: going through the recipe box and discussing the origins and merits of each dessert option, sharing the work of collecting ingredients, mixing and pouring, and waiting patiently as the kitchen filled with the delicious aroma of homemade dessert. Once the cake had cooled off enough to handle a bit of glaze, Grandma would fuss with the coffee pot while I got out the dishes, and we would settle in at the battered old kitchen table together to enjoy the results of our labors.

One of our fall favorites was Autumn Pumpkin Bundt Cake, a moist treat rich with the warming flavors of pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger and clove. Bernie, our publisher, says it might be better than pumpkin pie, but you can judge for yourself.

Autumn Pumpkin Bundt Cake

1 box spice cake mix
1 pkg instant vanilla pudding
1 c pumpkin
1/2 c oil
1/2 c water
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cloves
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1/2 c chopped pecans or walnuts
1/2 c powdered sugar for glaze

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix cake mix, pudding, pumpkin, salad oil, water, cinnamon, vanilla and eggs in mixer for 5 minutes. Stir in nuts and pour into very well sprayed bundt pan. Bake for 50-55 minutes. Let stand 10-15 minutes before removing from pan. When cake has cooled, mix powdered sugar with 1 tbsp hot water and a drop of vanilla and pour this glaze over cake.

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Lazy Preserving: Oven Dried Tomatoes

By Laura Johnson

It looks like the last couple of cold nights put an end to the South Dakota Magazine garden plot activity for 2011. If you recently harvested the last tomatoes of the season from your garden, consider saving them for enjoyment this winter by drying them in the oven. It’s my favorite kind of preserving, requiring very little effort or attention. Just bake for a few hours and then throw in the freezer for long-term storage. The results are magical — sweet, chewy and intense tomato discs ideal for throwing in improvised pasta mixtures or on pizza, or merely grabbed by the handful and consumed while still frozen. Dried and frozen cherry tomatoes are my favorite — they’re like icy tomato candies.

Wash and de-stem a pile of tomatoes. If using cherry, grape or pear tomatoes, slice in half. If using large tomatoes, cut in Ω inch slices. Place tomatoes on a cookie sheet lined with tin foil. You may drizzle olive oil, garlic and herbs over the top if you like. Bake at low heat (225 degrees or less), checking occasionally, until tomatoes reach the degree of dryness you desire. The drying time will vary depending on the size of your tomatoes — it could take anywhere between two to eight hours. Remove from oven and let cool. Place pan, uncovered, in freezer. Once frozen, the tomatoes can be moved to a plastic bag or sealable container for longer storage.

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Pick The Green Tomatoes

By Katie Hunhoff

Exploring our state’s mountains, waters and prairie is fun, but we’ve also found good stories in people’s kitchens. South Dakota Magazine editors have dined on everything from cactus to buffaloberries.

A few years ago, we wrote about green tomatoes and our readers quickly responded with comments and their own recipes. First of all, we heard that green tomatoes — like lutefisk and barbecued goat meat — should always be stored in a dumpster. Others maintained that the only good tomato is a red tomato; they shared a hundred ripening methods involving cardboard boxes, paper bags, mixing with bananas or hanging an entire uprooted vine in the garage.

But the majority of our readers expressed affection for green tomatoes. In fact, a sub-culture of sorts is developing. Longtime Brookings radio host Grant Peterson is a big promoter of frying them in batter. Faith historian Irean Jordan (her father, incidentally, was a famed wolf hunter a century ago) insists that they make the best jelly you’ll ever eat.

In a blind taste test, you’d probably never recognize green tomatoes as being in the tomato family. They are more acidic, firm and tart — calling for completely different recipes than ripe tomatoes. Still, they are nutritionally equal. The green ones have just as many nutrients and beta carotenes as the reds.

Green Tomato Pie

We received this pie recipe from Dolores Feilmeier of rural Yankton:

Pastry for two-crust pie
Six cups sliced green tomatoes
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons flour
1⁄4 teaspoon salt
1⁄4 teaspoon cinnamon
1⁄4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1⁄4 cup lemon juice

Line nine-inch pie pan with pastry crust. Peel and thinly slice green tomatoes. Combine sugar, flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. In another bowl, combine lemon peel (which she seldom uses) and lemon juice. Arrange tomatoes in layers in pie shell, sprinkling each layer with sugar and lemon mixtures. Dot with butter.

For top crust, roll reserved pastry dough on lightly floured surface 1⁄4 inch thick. Cut into strips, 10 x 1⁄2 inch. Arrange in lattice pattern over filling, moisten edges to seal strips.

Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Then reduce oven to 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes until tomatoes are tender and crust is brown.

*Delores says she usually uses a crumb crust on top of the pie. Our food editor used a crumb crust and a refrigerated store crust. She also omitted the nutmeg and cloves and substituted a teaspoon of cinnamon.


Green Tomato Jelly

Irean Jordan of Faith stopped making any other jelly after acquiring this recipe several years ago.”You too will love it,” she wrote.”It’s not green, but a bright sparkling red and the flavor is superb!”

6 cups chopped green tomatoes
5 cups sugar
1 double or 2 small boxes of raspberry Jell-O

Boil tomatoes and sugar for 20 minutes. Turn off burner and add Jell-O. Stir until dissolved. Pour into sterilized jars and enjoy!

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Gardener’s Pie

By Katie Hunhoff

Crispy bacon and goat cheese adorn this beet pie. Photo and recipe by Katie Hunhoff.

Gundy’s Market in Yankton is a fun Saturday morning stop, and a nice place to find fresh produce to experiment with in the kitchen.

The little market is located right next to Yankton’s famous Charlie’s Pizza House. Diana Gunderson manages Charlie’s, with help from her husband, Jon. They also have a Mission Hill farm where Jon raises cattle without growth hormone or antibiotics. Each Saturday they open the market at 9 a.m. to sell their beef along with with farm fresh eggs, locally grown pork, poultry and lamb. In the summer and early fall they also have produce from their large garden, and Diana makes honey, oatmeal and flaxseed breads. A cute little milk truck adds to the atmosphere – but you have to remember to bring your own milk jugs.

Last weekend I purchased some beets on a whim. They were gorgeous, bright purplish red. I was pretty surprised when I peeled one and saw it was white on the inside. A google search told me it was a Chioggia beet — even sweeter than a typical red beet, with the consistency of a potato. Intrigued, I decided to blend some ingredients into a sweet twist on a shepherd’s pie. The result was both sweet and savory. It was also very filling, and perfect for a chilly fall day.

Back to Charlie’s Pizza — they recently won an award from Food Network Magazine for having one of the 50 best pizzas in the country. The winner was the Festus, a spicy meatball and sauerkraut concoction. I think that Gundy’s beef may be one of the reasons it won the honor.

Gardener’s Pie

2 pounds Chioggia beets
3 carrot sticks
1 medium onion
3 garlic cloves
1/2 cup roasted walnuts (bake in oven at 350 degrees for 10 minutes)
6 slices cooked bacon or pancetta, crumbled
5 ounce package of goat cheese (mine was 5.8 ounces)
1 baked pie crust

First, you need to roast the vegetables. Pre-heat the oven at 400 degrees. Peel beets and carrots with a vegetable peeler. Spray beets, carrots, and onion with olive oil, sprinkle with a bit of salt and wrap individually in tin foil. I also placed the three garlic cloves in with the onion. Place on a cookie sheet and in oven to roast for approximately one hour, or until you can easily pierce with a fork. Chioggia beets are a bit trickier to roast than their red cousins. They cook quicker – and will turn an ugly gray if overcooked.

If your pie crust isn’t already prepared, this would be a good time to begin your pie crust. And a good time to roast the walnuts, and cook the bacon.

When vegetables are done, remove from oven and cut into very small pieces. Stir all vegetables together with the soft goat cheese. Place in pie crust and bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes. Top with crumbled bacon and goat cheese crumbles.

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Our Zucchini Cook-off

By Katie Hunhoff


Zucchini overwhelmed the little garden in the backyard of our South Dakota Magazine headquarters in downtown Yankton in 2010. We stopped watering it as soon as we realized what was happening, but still the zucchini proliferated. Despite the lack of respect or water — and being rudely tread upon as we tended to the tomatoes and onions — the zucchini continued to grow.

We gave it to the neighbors until they would no longer answer their doorbells. All of our staff and their extended families were compelled to take a cube or two every day. As one reader commented on our website (where we’d advertised free garden produce), two never-watered zucchini plants will suffice for a family of 15. And we had four plants. Four well-tended plants.

Zucchini soon piled up on office tables, inboxes and file cabinets. I had been eating zucchini at every meal for over a month when our editor suggested a zucchini cook-off to use up some of the reserves.

There was just one rule for the contest. Anyone could enter but you must get your zucchini from the magazine garden. First prize? You guessed it: a summer supply of zucchini.

The contest was first met with some grumbling. Several staffers claimed to dislike zucchini, most of all Roger, our humor columnist. He is not a fussy eater, but never takes a bite of food at the office in the summer months without asking if zucchini is involved. Roger had a bad experience with zucchini bread some time ago and still hasn’t forgotten.

Zucchini recipes can be hit-or-miss. The high water content (about 95 percent) can potentially result in a mushy mess. So expectations were low, to say the least, on the day of the zucchini cook-off.

All six entries smelled good and looked tasty. More importantly, they were declared delicious by one and all. Mock its reproduction capacity if you must, but zucchini’s flavor enhances everything from pasta dishes to chocolate cake, plus it adds Vitamin A, Vitamin C and potassium and is high in fiber.

Plucking the flowers from a zucchini plant will slow growth, but I’d consider curbing our zucchini production this year to be wasteful — especially with so many good recipes to make. The flowers themselves are an expensive delicacy in some cultures. But if you do harvest the flowers, you’ll still have plenty of zucchini for the little known”Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night” holiday. Yes, this is an actual observance, held on August 8. If only we’d known about that last summer.

Every one of the zucchini dishes submitted by staff and friends was a hit, so we declared them all winners. Trying to award a”first” seemed irrelevant when everybody was enjoying seconds. Here are some of the recipes.


Zucchini Brownies

Submitted by John Andrews, Departments Editor

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups shredded zucchini
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
6 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup margarine
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9×13 inch baking pan. In a large bowl, mix the oil, sugar and 2 teaspoons vanilla until well blended. Combine the flour, 1/2 cup cocoa, baking soda and salt; stir into the sugar mixture. Fold in the zucchini and walnuts. Spread evenly into the prepared pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until brownies spring back when gently touched.

To make the frosting, melt together the 6 tablespoons of cocoa and margarine; set aside to cool. In a medium bowl, blend together the confectioners’ sugar, milk and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Stir in the cocoa mixture. Spread over cooled brownies before cutting into squares.


Zucchini Cake

Submitted by Ruth Steil, Business Manager

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups grated zucchini

Mix all ingredients together. Bake in greased 9×13 inch pan at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Allow to cool, then frost with your favorite cream cheese frosting.


Zucchini Chili

Submitted by Jana Lane, Circulation Manager

27 oz can chili beans in sauce
15 oz can black beans drained
16 oz can kidney beans drained
1 lb burger cooked and drained
2 cups grated zucchini
1 quart canned tomatoes with juice or 28 oz. can
1 cups canned tomato juice
2 bell peppers, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons chili powder
2 1/2 tablespoons cumin
2 1/2 tablespoons dried cilantro
2 teaspoons paprika

Add all ingredients to a 6-quart Dutch oven and cook over medium heat for 40-45 minutes.


Lemon Zucchini Cookies

Submitted by Andrea Maibaum, Production Manager

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract or 1 teaspoon lemon rind
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup shredded unpeeled zucchini
1 cup chopped walnuts

Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and lemon extract. Stir in sifted dry ingredients. Mix in zucchini and nuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes. Let cool and glaze. Makes 30.


Zucchini Bread

Submitted by Michelle Andrews

1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 cup salad oil
2 cup zucchini, peeled and grated
3 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup nuts

Combine sugars, eggs and oil. Beat well. Add zucchini and vanilla. Sift and measure flour. Sift with salt, baking soda, cinnamon and baking powder. Stir into creamed mixture. Blend well. Add nuts. Pour into two greased and lightly floured large tin loaf pans. Bake at 325 degrees for one hour and 15 minutes.


Italian Zucchini Pie

Submitted by Katie Hunhoff, Managing Editor

2 tablespoons butter
4 cups thinly sliced zucchini
1 cup chopped onions
2 tablespoons dried parsley flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
2 eggs, well beaten
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (8 oz)
1 can (8 oz) crescent dinner rolls
2 teaspoons mustard

Heat oven to 375 degrees. In 12-inch skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat. Add zucchini and onions; cook 6 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tender. Stir in parsley flakes, salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil and oregano. In large bowl, mix eggs and cheese. Add cooked vegetable mixture; stir gently to mix.

Separate dough into 8 triangles. Place in ungreased 10 inch glass pie plate, 12×8 inch (2-quart) glass baking dish or 11-inch quiche pan; press over bottom and up sides to form crust. Firmly press perforations to seal. Spread crust with mustard. Pour egg mixture evenly into crust-lined pie plate. Bake 18 to 22 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

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Meet Tina

Tina Luttrell with her refreshing cucumber salsa.

South Dakota Magazine now has an even better connection to the beautiful north country of South Dakota — and her name is Tina Luttrell.
Tina has joined our office staff, and is performing a myriad of duties already.

She grew up on a Walworth County town, near the little city of Hoven — which of course we’ve featured on several occasions because it is home to the famous Cathedral of the Prairie, one of the West’s most amazing rural churches.

Tina and her husband, Jim, lived in Bristol before their recent move to Yankton, where he manages the Graham Tire Store. They have two daughters. Brittany, 20, works in Sioux Falls and Cassandra, 15, is a sophomore at Yankton High School.
On her very first morning, the former 4-Her brought a cucumber relish to the office. Do you think she’ll fit in here or not?


Tina Luttrell’s Summer Cucumber Salsa

3 medium to large cucumbers
1 green bell pepper
1 tsp fresh garlic
Ω cup red onion
2 jalapeno peppers
2 tbsp minced cilantro
2 tbsp minced fresh dill
3 squeezes of lime juice (from wedges or lime bottle)

Chop, toss, and chill overnight. Enjoy with tortilla chips — scoops work best!

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Different in Good Ways

By Katie Hunhoff

Our purpose at South Dakota Magazine — and at www.southdakotamagazine.com — is to share our explorations of life in South Dakota. All of us who work at the magazine are true believers that our state is unique to the world.

We don’t have the attitude that we’re better than other states — but different in some interesting and exciting ways. Sometimes I fear that we run the risk of losing the traits that make us different as the world becomes more homogenized. But surely we can preserve our diversity if we decide to — and that must begin with recognizing the parts of our culture worth preserving.

Dad and mom started South Dakota Magazine when I was six years old. My brother, Chris, and I grew up traveling to visit wonderful South Dakotans like Gladys Pyle, Clyde Ice and Ben Reifel. We hardly knew there was a world outside South Dakota because dad never left the state.

So I went away to college at the University of Minnesota and even studied for a year in Italy, where I stayed with a host family. To get acquainted, I told them about my home in South Dakota. I described the farms and the Black Hills and the carving at Crazy Horse.

“Ah, Cavallo Pazzo!” said Gino, my host dad. Then he ran into his bedroom and returned with a book about Crazy Horse and the Old West, printed in Italian.

Wow, I thought. South Dakota is famous.

A few years later, I returned to South Dakota to work at the magazine. I’d lived in some cool places, but I’d also learned from my travels — both with my parents and faraway on my own — that South Dakota needn’t take a back seat to any place in the world.

One of the things I like best about South Dakota is that every square inch doesn’t appear to be”all bought up and sold,” as a young lady from Vermillion told us once. We have places that seem almost undiscovered and untouched. A friend of mine recently bought an old brick railroad depot and converted it to an office for her business. That would have been unaffordable and impractical in many states and countries.

I lacked journalism experience when I returned to work at the magazine in 2002, but I did have an appreciation for South Dakota and an unending curiosity for the stories that tell us who we are as a people.

One of my favorite ways of exploring our state and people is through food. If you subscribe to the magazine, you probably know that I regularly write articles on South Dakota’s food culture, and I’ll extend that to my columns on this website too. Please email me with comments or ideas anytime at editor@southdakotamagazine.com.

Katie Hunhoff is an managing editor at South Dakota Magazine in Yankton and will be a regular columnist on www.southdakotamagazine.com.

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Meet Our New Staffer

Today’s an exciting day at the office. We began the day with some wheat bread and homemade raspberry jam, brought by our newest staffer, Laura Johnson. Laura is our assistant marketing director. She will be working with Heidi Marsh to be sure fresh, entertaining material is always available to you on our website.

Gardening and cooking are some of Laura’s favorite hobbies, so she might start contributing some recipes and food articles. Laura wrote a couple of paragraphs to introduce herself to our web readers. We asked her to share the raspberry jam recipe with you, too.

Our new staffer, Laura Johnson.

By Laura Johnson

I started out life on a farm north of Mission Hill. I can remember hot summer days spent out in the bean field spraying weeds with my dad and brothers. Every now and then, Dad would suggest we quit early for the day and head over to Ponds of Fun to relax. By Ponds of Fun, he meant the scummy, snapping turtle-infested pond in Mission Hill. It had its hazards, but the water was cool and it beat working.

After 13 years spent in exile in Minnesota, I moved back to South Dakota in 2006. One of the things that brought me back home was the desire to spend time with aging grandparents, but another draw was the ability to see the sky again. When you grow up loving farmland and prairie, being hemmed in on all sides by trees and buildings can be rather oppressive.

Last year, I was allowed access to a friend’s abandoned raspberry patch. I wasn’t even sure I liked raspberries, but was lured in by the idea of free food and the ability to indulge in my passion for pulling weeds. Once I had experienced the thrill of seeking out the little red berries while fighting off insects, thorny raspberry canes, and giant weeds, I was hooked. Once my friends and family tried the homemade raspberry jam that resulted from my labor, they were hooked too. Be careful who you choose to give a jar to – they will pester you for more.

Raspberry jam glows atop a slice of peanut butter toast.

Red Raspberry Preserves

4 cups raspberries
3 cups sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice

Makes about 3 cups.

Sort fresh raspberries, discarding any that are soft, moldy, or otherwise dubious looking. Rinse and drain them well.

Stir the raspberries, sugar, and the lemon juice together in a bowl, using a rubber spatula. Let the mixture stand, stirring gently once or twice, until the sugar has dissolved, about 2 hours.

Scrape the mixture into a stainless steel or other nonreactive large skillet or sautÈ pan. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly with a straight-ended wooden or nylon spatula, and boil it rapidly, stirring often, until it passes the jelly test; this will take from 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the juiciness of the berries. Remove from the heat.

Skim off any foam and ladle the hot preserves into hot, clean half-pint canning jars, leaving º inch of headspace. Seal the jars with new two-piece canning lids according to manufacturer’s directions and process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath. Cool, label and store the jars. The preserves will keep for at least a year in a cool cupboard.

If the jelling doesn’t work out, do not fret. Even if it does slide off your toast, the cooked berry-sugar mixture will still make a fine sauce for ice cream, waffles, or anything else that would benefit from a sweet, fruity topping.

From”The Good Stuff Cookbook” by Helen Witty

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Bernie’s Favorite Dessert

Bernie Hunhoff photo

By Katie Hunhoff

The Hunhoffs have been gathering for a Fourth of July picnic for over 20 years. Culinary-wise, it’s the highlight of the summer. Two long picnic tables are full of delicious summer salads and desserts. The main course is hotdogs from Steiner’s Locker in Yankton (which is also located just a couple of doors down from our magazine office and my house — so I like to say I live in the meatpacking district).

Some new foods crop up each summer at the picnic. This year, for example, my cousin Matt’s girlfriend, Kelsey, brought homemade candy corn in red, white and blue instead of orange, yellow and white. Kelsey actually has her own blog, Kelso’s Candy Dish, where she posts about her candy-making experiments.

And each year at the picnic I’ve also come to expect some old favorites, including Emma Lou’s rhubarb dessert. There would be a lot of disappointed people at the picnic if she missed bringing it one year. Here’s the official picnic invite we got this year from my dad:

Subject: Fourth of July Picnic

Hi Everybody,

Remember, we’re meeting at noon at the usual picnic shelter in Gavins Point for our annual Fourth of July Hunhoff picnic. Mark says we should just do what we always do, which means I will eat five hot dogs and try to hide Lou’s rhubarb dessert from you. See you on Monday at the lake.

He did try to hide it, but we were watching. Everybody had a chance to enjoy the dessert, and now you can do the same because Lou gave us the recipe.

Rhubarb Torte

2 cups flour
1 cup butter (Lou uses Blue Bonnet ole)
4 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Crumble together and pat into 9×13 cake pan. Bake in 325 degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes or until it starts to brown.

Filling:
6 egg yolks (save whites for meringue)
2 cups sugar
2/3 cup sour cream (Lou has always made with carnation milk)
4 tablespoons flour
4.5 cups rhubarb

Beat egg yolks with hand beater. Add sugar. Then add milk and flour. Pour over rhubarb and cook oat medium-high heat on your stovetop until it becomes thick. Lou said this happens pretty fast, and to stir constantly. Be careful because it will burn. Pour hot into the hot crust.

Top with meringue made with the 6 egg whites, 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, pinch of salt, and one cup of sugar. Beat these ingredients until stiff peaks form. Put meringue on filling and brown until quite dry in a 350 degree oven.

The torte can be refrigerated overnight, which Lour does if she’s taking it somewhere the next day. You an also use powdered sugar instead of regular sugar in the meringue and Lou says it won’t “weep” as much.

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Easy Summer Salad

By Katie Hunhoff

Today I ate lunch at the Open Door in Menno. It’s been years since I’ve visited the tiny, pretty town located near the James River. My dad told me that people used to come from miles around on Sundays to drink a cold beer in Menno’s very popular beer garden, which was more like a back alley than a garden.

These days people still gather on Sundays in Menno, but it’s for the brunch at the Open Door, not a beer party. The restaurant is run by Rita Hoff and is open seven days a week. Rita features German food on Tuesdays so today I tried some fleisch kuechle, knoefla and saurkraut. We’ll have a story on Rita’s German cooking in the September/October 2011 issue.

Besides making German dishes on Tuesdays and the large brunch on Sundays, Rita features homemade kuchen and donuts on Thursdays. All her food is made fresh daily, including the seven or eight salads she had featured when I stopped today. The pea salad was my favorite and I asked for the recipe (below). Rita said it was one of her easier recipes, and most popular.

Pea Salad

2 cups cooked macaroni
1 can peas, drained
Ω cup green sweet pickles
Ω shredded cheddar cheese
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup salad dressing
2 tablespoons sugar

Mix all ingredients and chill before serving.