Bacon Ranch Potatoes

How can you go wrong with potatoes? I love them! Trying to get inspired about what to make for dinner tonight, visions of sliced potatoes kept dancing through my mind. So I looked in the fridge to see what I could use and I found some good things, so here we go.

*About 4 medium baking potatoes. (*The potatoes I recently got at Costco are HUGE, so I only used 2.)

6 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled

2 green onions, chopped into approx. 1/4 inch slices

1.5 Cups grated cheese of your choice (I used cheddar)

1/2 C sour cream

3 Tbsp Ranch dressing (in a bottle)

1.5 Tbsp milk

A dash (or 2) cayenne powder

1 tsp. dill weed

If you like more creaminess and more Ranch flavor, double the sour cream, Ranch and milk portions.

These make terrific leftovers, so depending on how many you are cooking for, you could double the recipe to have leftovers.

Pre-heat oven to 350. Place bacon slices on a cookie sheet and bake for about 15 minutes in the oven. (Thinly sliced bacon works best for preparing in the oven.) While the bacon is in the oven, put on a pot of water to boil the potatoes in, adding a dash of salt to the water. Then slice the potatoes very thin, using a mandolin slicer if you have one. You want your potatoes no more than about 1/8 inch thick.

When the water has come to a boil, add the potatoes and boil for only 4-5 minutes. Drain the potatoes and place in a generously greased (buttered) baking dish, laying out as much as you can, although it is OK to have them overlapping. A 9X13 may be too big for this dish, but use whatever you want. (I used an oval dish that is about 8X10.)

In a bowl, mix together the sour cream, Ranch, milk, cayenne & dill. Poor over the potatoes. It will not be enough to cover them all. Top with the cut green onions, crumbled bacon and grated cheese.

This is before the cheese was added.

Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

Crab Dip

This is one of the best things I've come up with in a long time, in my opinion,and I've made it about 5 times in the last 2 weeks. But you first have to like crab, or Surimi.

Surimi is also known as fake crab, although it is made with real fish products - it's just a fraction of the price of real crab.

You can find Surimi in the seafood section at your supermarket, usually in small portions (possibly 6-10 "crab legs", which might be about a cup of meat.) I also found a 2.5 pound bag of it at Sam's Club for less than $7.00 - a great deal, since that makes about 6 batches of this dip. (I separated it out into 6 batches and then froze 5 of them.)

1 to 1.5 Cup of Surimi (or real crab if you want to splurge) chopped into small pieces

A generous half cup of Mayonnaise

1/4 Cup sour cream

1 or 2 Tbsp onion, finely chopped (I have used white, red and green onions at different times and they all were good.)

1 or 2 tsp lemon juice

1 Tbsp dill weed

1/8 to 1/4 tsp cayenne

1/8 tsp coarse black pepper

Mix it all up - it is ready to serve immediately, however, if you let it sit for awhile in the fridge, the onion flavor will come out more.

I use this with all kinds of crackers, crostini and party breads.