So a month ago I saw this story on a local station about The First Hotdish Recipe. As a Minnesotan would suspect, it came from a housewife and was published in her Lutheran church's cookbook. I am a sucker for experiencing superlatives, so despite not being able to cook, I became obsessed with at least thinking about making this dish.
Somehow, the transcription of the story on the station's website does not have the recipe. But after searing around the Internet, I found it on a website called Ramshackle Pantry. Seems straightforward enough; I may not cook, but I think I know how to follow instructions. Two of the things you need to do are cook the hamburger (which I'm guessing is ground beef in modern parlance) and cook the pasta, and I know how to do both because I make spaghetti. Everything else appears to be a case of just buying the stuff, throwing them all into a baking dish (which I had to buy, ironically), and not being afraid to use the stove.
After some thought, I deciding I was going to do it. And then Mother told me they'd be home in late March (which is just two weeks from now), and considering all the other food I had bought for myself, I thought I had to eat all that stuff first. Besides, clean-up is going to be a mess.
So I put it out of my mind until maybe the next time my parents leave. But then some things just started coming together. For one, someone from work left a can of refried beans in the break room one day. For some reason, I took it. I thought I could combine it with the rice I would make for myself one of these days because white rice by itself is boring. A few weeks later, however (which was a couple weeks ago), I saw carrots and onions in the break room, presumably left by the same person. The original recipe called for onions, so I took those. I don't remember why I took the carrots. But shortly thereafter I realized that this is food I also should eat up before my folks come home. And the thing is, carrots and refried beans are not part of the recipe. But I concluded that if I don't make some kind of hotdish, I would be wasting all of this food I took home with me.
So, after I modified and/or chucked a lot of the ingredients, I decided to make it. I substituted the carrots and the beans for the celery and the peas in the original recipe. I had half a box of seashell pasta from the time I made spaghetti, and I saw Mother left a small portion of angel hair pasta in a box in the pantry, so even though the original recipe called for rotini, I forewent that so I could use up even more leftovers. And once the secondhand baking dish (as recommended by The Wirecutter) was delivered home via Amazon, it was time to try making it. And I tried last/Thursday night.
And it turned out ... uh, it turned out. First of all, the guy from the Ramshackle Pantry website said prep time is only half an hour, and that's crap because it took me more than two hours to peel the carrots, wash the refried beans, cut the onions, cook the onions and ground beef and make the pasta. Anyway, I couldn't throw into the baking dish all the ingredients I wanted to use because it got too full. One thing I noticed from the original recipe is that it wasn't as "bindy," or cheesy as I though hotdishes should be. Apparently a creamy soup helps with that, and it just so happened that I bought a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup that I hadn't gotten around to eating with the bowl of rice I haven't yet made. But after adding the carrots and the beans and the onions and ground beef and diced tomatoes (I kept that from the original) and the pasta, I thought adding the soup was going to spill the whole hotdish over. I thought it was going to spill over anyway, so I put the baking dish on a baking sheet to collect all the food that otherwise would've reached the bottom of the oven. I did have parmesan cheese I sprinkled into the hotdish, but it doesn't look like it helped with the, uh, bindiness. I was given 2 1/2 pounds of ground beef when I asked for only two, so maybe that extra 1/2-pound was the reason I couldn't add Cream of Chicken soup.
Otherwise, uh, it's edible. I could eat it. But it is kind of bland, I think. The recipe calls for salt and pepper to taste, and I even added some paprika, but I didn't measure any of it. I just sprinkled it on there, and I wonder if I should have added more, or less.
Regardless, I have a whole baking dish of it left to eat. And in another bit of irony, I think it'll take me a few days to eat it all, so I thus have made myself more food I should eat before my parents get home, even though I had already said I need to go through all this food I already have. But I am glad that I made, or attempted to make, a hotdish. Now I know what it takes to prepare and what I can do to improve the product. I hope to follow the original hotdish recipe the next time I tackle it, and I intend for it to turn out well.
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