Jodie Rogers

New Chicken Bone Fire Department member Jodie Rogers of Bruce has now learned to make the banana pudding and butterfinger cake the ladies serve when the department has a fundraiser cooking or caters an event. She joined the fire department in February and learned to make those desserts from member Connie Rogers.

“My family raves over the chess pie,” she said, in telling that she has been making it since she was 10 or 11, and learned from her mamaw, Bonnie King. She is always asked to make dessert for their family gatherings, and chess pie is always included. Other things she might make are lemon pie, Oreo balls, lemon delight or cupcakes, which she loves to decorate. Her favorite cupcake flavors are strawberry and yellow. She loves cake decorating, which she learned about from “Mamaw Cat”?(Cathy O’Bannon) and also uses her royal icing recipe. She most recently made a castle birthday cake for her sister, Kodie, which she said took two days to complete the decoration. “I went big the first time with that castle cake.” She really likes to decorate cakes even though it is very time consuming.

She loves to experiment, especially with desserts, and her Food Network favorites are Paula Deen and Rachel Ray. She says she usually prints recipes from Food Network and does make them. Spaghetti is her favorite food and she often changes sauces and what she puts into it. She says she is not good with casseroles, and that a recent chicken ranch dish did not turn out great.

Jodie learned most of her cooking from Bonnie, and a lot of what she cooks is family dishes that she watched her mamaw make. The goulash was always one of her favorites and now she’s making it. “It’s completely opposite of what you might think of goulash,” she said. Jodie cooked a lot as a teenager, saying she would help out by cooking supper, and her mother, LaDonna, loved it. She joked that her mom had to learn how to cook when Jodie got a place of her own, but that she was doing good, and had now mastered potato salad.

Bacon-Potato Salad
1 pack bacon
1 yellow onion
Half small bag of golden potatoes
Cook bacon and chop into small pieces. Cook onion in bacon grease. Cut potatoes into cubes and boil until tender. When tender, drain water and pour bacon, onion and leftover grease on top of potatoes. Mix well and enjoy.

Chess Pie
3 eggs
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
2 Tbsp. flour
2 Tbsp. corn meal
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 deep dish pie crust
Preheat oven to 350°. Use fork and poke bottom of crust. Mix ingredients together and pour into crust. Bake until lightly brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean.

Mamaw’s Goulash
Lb. hamburger meat
Chopped yellow onion
1 Tbsp. vinegar
2 Tbsp. worcestershire sauce
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
Cook together until hamburger meat is done. Pour into boiler and add 1 1/2 cups of elbow noodles, a quart of tomato juice, and two cans of diced tomatoes. Let simmer until noodles are done.

Lemon Pie
Shortbread pie crust
8 oz. pack cream cheese
1 can condensed milk
1/2 cup lemon juice
Couple drops of yellow food coloring for that lemon look
Mix together and pour into crust. Let chill in refrigerator a couple of hours.