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Here’s What’s Cookin’ This Christmas Season at Silver Dollar City
DEBBIE UHRIG is a class cook and one of the cooking presenters at Silver Dollar City.
By Pat Lindsey
There’s always something new to see or do in Silver Dollar City, just named by AOL Travel as one of the top ten “Best Christmas Lights Displays” in the country. The problem is finding the time to do it all. After several family trips to that wonderland of crafts and entertainment, I carved out just one hour for myself to take a class at the Culinary & Craft School.
The school offers a variety of one-hour classes each month and the schedule can be found online at sdcculinarycraftschool.com or by calling 1-800-831-4Fun. My class featured side dishes for Thanksgiving or Christmas and ran from 4:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. Class cook, Debbie Uhrig and her kitchen helper, Mary Ann Corbin, demonstrated the fine art of making homemade noodles, classic dressing, and a cranberry gelatin salad.
The spacious kitchen in the 1880s replica of a farmhouse would make any cook green with envy. The room was packed and every seat was filled on a recent Saturday during the Old Time Christmas celebration when Debbie started explaining that noodles over mashed potatoes are a very popular side dish in Kansas.
With just four ingredients and a lot of muscle behind her rolling pin, she rolled out the noodle dough into a very thin rectangle and then sliced it into desired widths. Noodles need to dry for at least two hours before they can be cooked, so the noodles Debbie cooked in class were actually rolled out in a previous class.
From noodles, it was on to the dressing. Debbie prefers to use sourdough bread and real chicken stock in her dressing, but that is a matter of taste. Dressing, however, can be personalized just by adding apples, raisins, dried cranberries, nuts, mushrooms, saltines, cornbread, peppers, cooked sausage, diced turkey, giblets, cinnamon or nutmeg. To get good homemade chicken stock, put a chicken in a crockpot with bay leaves, onion, celery, salt and pepper and let it cook all day.
The refreshing cranberry salad is simple enough for a child to make. Two boxes of Cranberry Jello are dissolved in two cups of boiling water. Then¸a can of drained crushed pinapple and one can of whole cranberry sauce are blended into the Jello. Nuts are added last before refrigerating. Pour into a 9 x 13 pan and refrigerate until set. Cut into squares and serve on a bed of lettuce.
The best part of the class is sampling what the cook made and getting the recipes to take home. Here is the recipe for homemade chicken and noodles. Debbie said a bag of homemade noodles tied with a bow and the recipe attached makes a great little holiday gift.
No matter how you slice it, at $12 plus tax per class, the Culinary and Crafts School at Silver Dollar City is a bargain. Seating in the Demonstration Kitchen is open 10 minutes prior to your scheduled class, available on a first-come basis as you check in at the Culinary & Craft School, which is located just past the entrance to Echo Hollow® Amphitheatre. Reservations may be purchased online, by calling 800-475-9370 or at the Culinary & Craft School.
