Family Favorites-Holiday Side Dishes: Holiday Potato Casserole

This next recipe in my Family Favorites: 10 Holiday Side Dishes series is Holiday Potato Casserole and it’s delicious!  Kevin actually brought this recipe home with him when he was out in North Carolina on a bear hunt a few years ago.  The family that he was staying and hunting with spoiled him with some really good food.  Kay was nice enough to share this recipe with him and it’s been a favorite ever since!  It’s cheesy and creamy mashed potatoes that have a little crunch that are festive and can be paired with about any kind of meat and veggie.  And the best thing is that you can make them ahead of time and then just pop them in the oven right before you eat!  The recipe is below.  Enjoy!

As you know the past few weeks I’ve been talking about the Thankful 4 Ag campaign.  I am teaming up with Bayer CropScience who is partnering with Feeding America to help bring awareness and raise money for people and families who struggle with hunger.  This time of the year is really special for families when they get together and celebrate the holidays, a lot of the times these gatherings are centered around food.  But 1 out of every 6 people in America are facing hunger issues.  So to help with this, every time someone goes to the Thankful 4 Ag website and creates a digital meal with four of his or her favorite Thanksgiving dishes, Bayer will donate 10 meals to Feeding America this holiday season.  There’s almost 25,000 meals donated already!

With that I’d also like to share some fun agriculture facts from Farmers Feed US:

• Mature turkeys have more than 3,500 feathers.
• There are 47 different breeds of sheep in the U.S.
• Pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world.
• The average person consumes 584 pounds of dairy products a year.
• 160 degrees Fahrenheit is the correct cooking temperature to ensure safe and savory ground beef.
• Elevators in the Statue of Liberty use a soybean-based hydraulic fluid.
• Like snowflakes, no two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.
• The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
• Twenty-nine cuts of beef meet government guidelines for lean.
• The average dairy cow produces seven gallons of milk a day, 2,100 pounds of milk a month, and 46,000 glasses of milk a year.
• Turkeys originated in North and Central America, and evidence indicates that they have been around for more than 10 million years.
• Agriculture employs more than 24 million American workers (17% of the total U.S. work force).
• Today’s American farmer feeds about 155 people worldwide. In 1960, that number was 25.8.
• Raising beef cattle is the single largest segment of American agriculture.
• One pound of wool can make 10 miles of yarn. There are 150 yards (450 feet) of wool yarn in a baseball.
• Soybeans are an important ingredient for the production of crayons. In fact, one acre of soybeans can produce 82,368 crayons.
• The heaviest turkey ever raised weighed 86 pounds, about the size of an average third-grader.
• Cows are herbivores, so they only have teeth on the bottom.
• There are 350 squirts in a gallon of milk.
• Cows must give birth to a calf in order to produce milk.

Please leave me a comment if you go and share a meal on the Thankful 4 Ag website!  Happy holidays!