I Attempted Snicker Bar Salad (and a Hot Dish Too!)

Diving into Minnesota cuisine via whipped topping and vanilla pudding...

It began in Toronto. I ambled into a bookstore chain called Indigo in search of a bottle of water. Naturally I was sidetracked by a sign that announced “Heather’s Picks,” which confused and intrigued me. Who was Heather? Should I trust Heather? Did she know where the beverages were? I only needed this halting moment to fully derail me from my original task (water) and send me into Danger Browsing mode (a state wherein you are particularly prone to a spontaneous shopping spree).

Unsurprisingly, I drifted into the cookbook section where I found many exciting titles: Norwegian Baking Through The Seasons, Budmo!, and much more. Amongst them was a plucky little book called Homestead Recipes by Amanda Rettke. It promised a variety of Minnesota-based recipes… or more specifically “Midwestern inspirations, family favorites, and pearls of wisdom from a sassy home cook.” Hey, I’m a sassy home cook! This should be perfect for me.

I flipped through the pages and saw endless photos of ground beef and cheese and corn and more cheese. My foodie snobbery immediately kicked in. It all looked processed and awful. But also… paradoxically… amazing? I mean, a baking dish full of cheese and Tater Tots isn’t very chic, but it’s also totally irresistible.

As much as I babble about fresh herbs and farmers markets and this and that, there is a real art to making something special from canned, frozen, or processed ingredients. Kentucky Beer Cheese relies on cheddar, Bud Light, and seasonings. Buffalo chicken dip weds shredded (or chunk) chicken with ranch dressing and cream cheese. And Korean Army Stew famously elevates Spam, instant ramen noodles, and hot dogs. These are beloved dishes for good reason: they’re delicious. And they’re also great reminders that a semi-homemade recipe isn’t necessarily unworthy. After all, can we really turn our noses up at a can of cream of mushroom soup while simultaneously embracing tinned fish?

Maybe.

It’s a false equivalency, but it’s cute for the purpose of this newsletter. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I do like to think there’s a time and a place for most ingredients — and yes, that includes Velveeta. Just because Amanda Rettke’s recipes are not anything I would normally gravitate towards, who was I to act like I was better than, say, her Lasagna Soup or Hamburger Stroganoff or… Piggy Pickle Pizza?

As a self-anointed food writer, it is my job to embrace ALL culinary traditions… even ones that scare me. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to feel self-important. The truth is that when I looked at Rettke’s recipes, they were so foreign, so anti-Foodie, and so… cringey (gah! Snobbery!) that I felt they either had to be absolutely amazing or total disasters. Take, for example, the Candy Bar Apple Salad.

Nestled into the Soups and Salad chapter, the Candy Bar Apple Salad challenges just how loosely we can stretch the term “salad.” It calls for Snickers bars, apples, vanilla pudding mix, whipped topping, and marshmallows. I apologize Minnesotans, but I was aghast.

Amanda Rettke, in my mind, had basically just said “I am going to concoct a HORRIFYING recipe, and I will publish it in a book, and people will buy it. And those bold readers will be rewarded with a ‘salad’ so delicious that they will tell all their friends, and no one will believe them. But those lucky few will know. THEY are the true foodies.” Naturally, I bought the book.

Very shortly thereafter, I learned that Amanda Rettke did not invent this salad (so hard not putting “salad” in quotes). The candy bar apple salad or Snickers salad is actually a thing. I promptly texted my friend Nicci, who hails from Minnesota.

Now I was even more intrigued by this godforsaken salad. Could it actually be tasty? Two months later I found myself in St. Paul, MN. Nicci arrived at my hotel room with a container of Snickers salad. It was… well… let’s put a pin in that.

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My friend Katherine Spiers hosts the podcast Smart Mouth which focuses on people, the dishes they love, and culinary history. I don’t remember if Katherine reached out to me or vice versa, but over the summer we decided we would make Amanda Rettke’s Candy Bar Apple Salad and discuss it on Smart Mouth. I figured as long as we were opening up the pages of Homestead Recipes, we might as well throw in a hot dish too — Minnesota’s famed contribution to the casserole genre.

My instinct told me to go for the classic Tater Tot hot dish, but I couldn’t help eyeing Rettke’s Meat Raffle Hot Dish, an orange melange of ground beef, cheddar cheese, corn, and macaroni. The real appeal was the recipe’s description, which unveiled the world of meat raffles to me.

According to Rattke, who actually has a pretty wry sense of humor about all her recipes, a meat raffle is the following: “you go to a bar and buy a ticket for a dollar, and then a sweet gal will spin the wheel and announce who won that round. If it was you, you get to sit at the bar with a pound of grond beef or whatever cut of beef they’re giving away that night.” Sounds like a good time to me.

Again, I consulted Nicci.

Nevertheless, the Meat Raffle Hot Dish is billed as a great way to use up your winnings. I’m not aware of any meat raffles here in Los Angeles, but if I couldn’t participate in the game, at least I could pretend like I had. Meat Raffle Hot Dish it was!

Katherine and I descended on my kitchen in mid September to embrace our Northern Midwestern non-roots. First up was the salad. It came together quickly, given that the most intensive labor was slicing some apples and Snickers. We tossed Granny Smiths with the aforementioned vanilla pudding, whipped topping, Snickers, and mini marshmallows. I can’t say that my mouth was salivating, especially listening to the squishy sound of the rubber spatula pushing through the ingredients, but we had to be brave. Would this be my new guilty pleasure or an act of blood sugar terrorism?

Katherine Spiers of Smart Mouth

Welp… It was… fascinating. Snickers salad, as it turns out, is not nearly as bad as I feared… but it also wasn’t the guilty pleasure I had hoped for either. Some elements worked well, but I wasn’t convinced that all the ingredients were necessarily playing nicely together. Apple and chocolate is not a famed duo for a reason; so understandably the Granny Smith/Snickers combo didn’t quite hit for me. Plus, the pudding and the whipped topping were plenty sweet already — did we really need marshmallows too? All in all, the dish was intensely sugary and just sort of… strange.

The final product.

And yet! I kept eating it. I immediately thought back to June when Nicci brought the Snickers salad to my hotel. That was actually the first time I had tried this Minnesota delicacy. I was not a fan. But fast forward to 11:30 PM that same night. I had just finished performing a live show of Watch What Crappens at a nearby venue, and every restaurant in the city seemed to be closed. I was absolutely famished, but I had nothing to eat… nothing but a container of Snickers salad in my hotel fridge. There was no way I was going to have Snickers salad for dinner, but maybe a spoonful wouldn’t hurt. Somehow I located a Spork and took two bites of this sickly sweet dish. Let me rephrase that. I took two conscious bites because when I eventually looked down, I discovered I had eaten half the salad.

Maybe that is the true magic of Snickers salad. There is something very consumable about this odd, retro dish. I can see how someone could easily grow to love and even crave Snickers salad, especially if it’s something tied to fond childhood memories or nostalgia. As a non-Minnesotan, I don’t have those connections; so Snickers salad doesn’t activate my pleasure zones. I could probably get there with some reps, but I have enough sugary vices as it is. Let’s not add another.

As for the hot dish, it also came together easily. Despite requiring a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup and some whole milk, the dish was not terribly heavy. I was hoping for more creaminess from the cheese — the overall texture was a bit crumbly — but just a minor note on an otherwise fine and functional hot dish. The larger issue was the simplicity of flavor. Seasoned with only some garlic and salt and pepper, the Meat Raffle Hot Dish tasted a bit one note. It definitely felt like the sort of dinner a harried parent could get to the table while breaking up scuffles amongst kids. Still, that doesn’t mean it should skimp on flavor.

Not my most photogenic work.

Well, Katherine came and left. Our day of cooking and podcasting was a delight, but now I was left with a big-ass Meat Raffle Hot Dish in my fridge. I didn’t want to throw it out because that’s just wasteful. So instead I endeavored to zhuzh it up. I contemplated all sorts of elaborate and fancy ways to elevate this hot dish, but in the end, the answer was absurdly straightforward: a squeeze of lime juice and several dashes of Cholula sauce. That’s all it needed - some acid and heat (because it already had salt and fat). Game changer. Suddenly the Meat Raffle Hot Dish went from pedestrian and forgettable to delicious and zingy, all with the help of a basic pantry staple. I ate the hot dish gladly for a whole week.

I’m not sure where this journey has taken me. I’m a Minnie outsider cooking food I wasn’t raised with and expecting it to automatically appeal to my tastes. Is that unreasonable? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m still intrigued by Rettke’s book though, partly because I do find her joyfully winsome. I want to try her Tater Tot Hot Dish, not to mention most of her breakfast and dessert recipes. I suspect there’s a real pot luck superstar in the pages of Homestead Recipes. I’m just not sure it involves Snickers and apples.

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Oh hey! NBD Fancy celebrated its 1 year anniversary yesterday! Thanks to everyone for the kind words and support. This is a labor of love; so I greatly appreciate every share and subscription over the past twelve months. But even if you’ve merely glanced at a paragraph and moved on, I’m super thankful that you came by to check this out. More cooking adventures to come!