We Need Your Help: Send Me Your Nebraska Inspired Recipes

We are in the search for some “Nebraska Inspired” recipes that my family will try and we will review. My wife is really excited for this (heavy sarcasm).

I hope my wife doesn’t leave me before the end of this series.

We are hoping for some creative “Nebraska Inspired” recipes. I will take on all comers except for the following:

1. Steak recipes
2. Boring Corn Recipes (looking at you corn casserole)
3. Runza recipes
4. Pizza recipes
5. Chili recipes (I got sick the last time I had Chili and have yet to recover)
6. Cinnamon Rolls (I’m not really into sweets, but maybe I can be convinced otherwise)

So let’s take a minute to explain what I mean by “Nebraska Inspired.” There are two separate categories.

Recipes with Nebraska Products

Nebraska Products can be illustrated by the following picture:

Dorothy Lynch Meatballs. Now that’s creative. I could see this being horrible. I could see it being great. I don’t think it could fall somewhere in the middle. It will either be great or horrible.

Dorothy Lynch is well known to be a “Nebraska product” and people use it in many different ways. So there have to be other recipes out there as well.

What else is known to be a Nebraska product? Kool-Aid. Maybe somebody has a creative recipe that uses Kool-Aid?

So try and think outside of the box. We are willing to try ALMOST anything.

Now onto the second category.

Recipes from Nebraskan Communities and Families

I live in a community that is largely German in heritage. There are other communities like Wilber, that has a great Czech influence. Gothenberg may be Swedish? Or maybe Stromsburg. There is a strong Vietnamese community in Lincoln. A strong Latino community in Omaha.

So there have to be some great recipes that have been passed on generation-by-generation in some of these communities.

My family has a strong Irish tradition, but when I went to Ireland I thought the food was rather...unimpressive. So maybe somebody can surprise me with something from Ireland. Looking at you O’Neil!

Our basketball writer says Newman Grove is the Norwegian capital of Nebraska. So there has to be something from there!

Or maybe there some recipes from one of the numerous Native American or Indigenous tribes that can be found throughout the state.

I will take all-comers.

So as of right now I have one recipe to make and review. Week 1 will be the Dorothy Lynch Meatballs. I hope to do this once a week during the off-season, but I will need help from you to provide the recipes! Depending upon the response it could be a one article thing, or it could turn into a weekly series.

In fact, if I get inundated with recipes then maybe I can get some of the other members of the Corn Nation staff to help me out. We will do our best!

Send them to my at my email address, nmchugh85@gmail.com, put it in the comments of this article, or DM me on twitter (@nmchugh85). I likely will not respond on twitter until after Easter.

So let’s see what happens.