Hot Dish
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa
When Dave came home from Minnesota last month, he brought me some omiyage, a "hot dish" (read: casserole) cookbook. We had a good laugh over some of the recipes and then it got put into rotation in the Toilet Tank Library (that is, on the toilet tank, where we store all the good bathroom reading, like Wired and old copies of Ceramics Monthly). I never expected it to be of any real use to us beyond its comedic value.
But I was wrong: Because there's a phot of Dave making "hot dish." Green bean "hot dish" to be precise. There it is in the prep stages, just after the half & half (!) was added to the cream of mushroom soup (!!). (To be fair, the recipe calls for whole milk and cream of mushroom soup, but half & half was what we had.)
I have to say that I don't shy away from many foods, and I've eaten some pretty disturbing things in my time, but green bean "hot dish" scared me a little bit. There was no one point at which it scared me more. I wasn't more scared of the finished dish than I was of the dish as it was being prepared, I mean. (And in the end, trust me, it looked like someone had jizzed all over a pan of green beans and topped it with fried onion bits. Not really all that appetizing.)
Yes, I ate a serving--it wasn't bad--and Dave ate the rest of the pan.
However, having broken his "hot dish" cherry, Dave now wants to go on and try a bunch more "hot dish" recipes. One of the few impediments to his evil plan is that about ninety percent of the recipes in the book are meat based, and he, of course, is a vegetarian. (Yes, we have Quorn, so we can do all the chicken recipes with fake chicken. And there are some respectable fake ground beef substitutes, so we can do the ground beef-based recipes. Thankfully he'll steer clear of the seafood in real or fake forms, so I won't be subjected to, say, something called "Shrimp Shrimp Hot Dish" which has both real (frozen) shrimp and cream of shrimp soup in it.)
"Hot dish," yea or nay?
2 comments:
You have me giggling over here! I have an old cookbook my elementary school made when I was little. All the mom's had to add 1 recipe and at the end of the year the cookbooks were given out to whoever ordered one.
It was one of the things I brought to Japan with me. However I didn't open it until last year I think. What did I learn by reading this cookbook?
#1, many many American recipes and casseroles called for Cambell's soup...usually cream of something, lol! *winks*
#2, many casserole dishes called for tater tots!
And many a salads were made with shredded carrots and raisins were added in everything! Ha ha ha.
So, you have my utter and upmost respect for trying the recipe!
PS, do you think we would be like getting double points if we added tater tots AND Cambell's soup? I should make a casserole for my Japanese lady friends someday, they'd probaby pass out. Ha ha ha.
Oh my! Your Japanese friends eating a tater tot casserole!! That makes me laugh!! You can tell them it's like American monjya-yaki!
Of course, they do have ome-rice (sp?). The first time I saw that, I was like: Whoa! An omelet made with ketchup and rice beats a casserole made with tater tots and cream of (stuff) soup!
Post a Comment