North Dakota. Goodness in a bag.

North Dakota: our next stop on our SoMP meal board. What makes this unassuming state so special? Although North Dakota isn’t the lead potato producer, it still holds the world’s biggest french fry feed, with its record being 5,220 pounds of french fries served up and eaten. North Dakota also holds the Guinness World Record of snow angels made. That’s right! The record occurred during February of 2007 when 8,962 people made snow angels on the state capitol grounds. And since 39 million acres, or almost 90%, of North Dakota is farmland, it has a classic Midwest feel .

Like other Midwestern states, North Dakota is known for “dump it all together” type meals: hot dishes, beef commercials, and kuchen. Our chosen SoMP meal fits right in: add slightly spicy ground burger, cheese, lettuce, and other toppings to a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, and you have a classic Midwestern taco in the bag, or walking taco.

No one can really claim where tacos in a bag started but North Dakotans claim that they were a popular concession meal at hockey and basketball games. Plus, my brother loves them, so of course we knew his vote.

And we can’t leave the Midwest until we’ve made one of the most popular potluck sides often associated in the Midwest. It’s called a salad, but has no greens or leafy vegetables in sight. What is it? Jello. But it’s not straight up, plain old jello. It’s jello dressed up and ready to go to the dance. It’s jello served on a gold plate fit for a Queen. It’s jello that begs you to eat it with your pinkie in the air.

Midwesterners like to get creative on what they mix into their jello. Carrots and celery, bananas, pineapples, oranges, marshmallows, and staplers (sorry Dwight) are all common and nothing is off-limits. We decided to go with orange jello salad, a classic combination.

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The fanciest Jello in the entire Midwest.

We started out our jello by mixing orange Jello, vanilla pudding mix, pineapple juice (which I drank the spare can of because pineapple is just that good), and let it come to a boil. Once cooked, we added crushed pineapple, oranges, and whipped cream.

Now time to let it set. Since this jello is ready to buy its own island, it MUST be served in the most expensive crystal bowl you can find. If it’s the family heirloom passed down through the generations that you had to borrow from your second cousin, even better. The fanciest bowl we could find was my Grandma DeGrote’s bowl that may have been leftover from SoMP Christmas. We slopped in the jello and let it set for a few hours while we worked on the tacos.

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The secret to tacos in a bag: Dortios.

We started our taco in a bag with the chips and bag, of course! No taco in a bag is complete without Nacho Cheese Doritos chips so we started there. We made our meat using our taco meat recipe from our Navajo tacos, which I find us using more and more as of late. While the meat was cooking, we took our chip bags and essentially beat them until they were crunched up. Then we stuffed our chip bags with our meat and our favorite taco toppings such as cheese, lettuce, sour cream, and anything else we needed.

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Pinkies up!

We then served them up and dug in. The tacos and Jello were great, and I hope they become a staple. My little brother, Ike, agrees with me and has asked at least six times to make them again. I must admit this was probably the easiest SoMP meal we have made yet. And by far the fanciest.