Whats Fa Dinna?

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Last night one of my new fabulous roommates cooked some delicious casserole to fuel our karaoke outing. It was comprised of pasta, mushrooms, zucchini, corn, cheddar cheese, cream of potato soup, and topped with American cheese slices and potato chips.

GODDAMN that was good. Alarmingly good. Equally alarming was the presence of single-serve American cheese slices in my home.Let’s just say it’s been a while since I bought anything lower than Cabot-grade cheese to bring home (that Annie’s DLuxe no-mix mac sauce doesn’t count!) Laura’s delicious Krafty casserole fueled an adventuresome evening of belting out Kate Bush and Pat Benetar tunes.

Which brings me back….

One of my beloved college roommates was from Minnesota, and schooled us east coast kids in his people’s proud tradition of Hotdish. Wikipedia offers:

“Hotdish is any of a variety of baked, casserole dishes popular in the Midwestern United States, and especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. It consists of a starch, a meat, and a canned vegetable, mixed together with canned soup, which serves as a binding ingredient.

Hotdishes are filling, convenient, easy to make, and well-suited for family reunions, church suppers, and potlucks, where they may be paired with pan-baked cookies known as bars.”

(What we ate was not strictly hotdish, as it did not contain a meat. It did, however, contain freshly cooked mushrooms and zucchinis, as well as canned corn, which for our purposes ssubstituted for a meat.)

The members of my college household, featuring the Minnesotan plus two more of my closest pals, would to convene in our kitchen  late in the evening when we were done with classes, work, library study, etc., and prepare a collective small meal, such as noodles or cheese and bread or soup or leftovers, which we took to calling “Hotsnack.”

For “Hot Snack,” The Urban Dictionary offers the following definition:

“It is when you are just sitting around minding your own business and you have a little unexpected burp and a small amount of acidy puke comes up with it and you have to swallow the ‘hot snack’.”

That’s totally not what our hotsnack was like, but it’s a nice surprise to learn that the phenomenon which I have taken to calling “throwing up in your mouth a little” has a concise, catchy little name. Thanks, Urban Dictionary!

Anyway, if you are about to feed a bunch of folks, especially pre- or post- drunk folks, consider Hotdish. It’s comfort food to the max, cheap, easy, plentiful, filling, and perhaps even healthy by some definitions. I hear

tater tots are the potato ingredient of choice, but I gotta say, potato chips melted into the cheese on top was absolutely scrumtrillescent.

Things like hotdish make me really excited for winter, for carb-loading, hibernating animalian behavior, for cheesy baked things and squishy happy boozy evenings dressing up a little more butch than usual and going out to sing karaoke with a new posse of entertaining roommates who like to hang out at home and cook sometimes.

I’ve had a pretty interesting weekend of ingesting mind-altering substances and kicking it with the pals in Brooklyn.

Friday was a rainy bummer of a day, so I met with some friends at the hippest spot in Bushwick hell, Wyckoff Starr coffee shop, for a cup of DAMN good coffee, and HOT. Wyckoff Starr like Northeast Kingdom down the street, makes me feel very confused because it is so clearly a hangout for the white hipsters in the neighborhood, but also the only place to get a cup of coffee that doesn’t have that kitty litter aftertaste. We were en route to Main Drag Music in W’burg, so that I could attempt to trade in corny old Warwick bass for some cash dollars to buy myself a SansAmp or something.

It looks just like this.

DENIED. Main Drag= WAYYYY too cool to have a Warwick bass hanging around. He told me to go to Guitar Center, which was sort of insulting until I remembered that I got the bass years ago at a Sam Ash. So it goes. I’ll do it eventually. In the meantime if anyone wants a mid-grade active pickup “Rock Bass” I’ll sell it real cheap. Like 100 bucks.

We then ate some delicious and inexpensive Thai food on Bedford. Of course I ordered Drunken Noodles with Veggie Duck, the best thing ever. They are named for their large, irregularly cut wide noodles (as if a drunk person cut them up.)

We then decided that to soothe our rainy day blues, and because we are young and reckless and didn’t have to go to work that day, we would go back to my house and make some special tea.

Boy was that fun. Totally mellow and funny. Sometimes it takes a psychedelic experience to snap me out of my grouchy whining super neurotic inner monologue and be reminded that I’m 24, have great friends, live with my nice boyfriend and cat in a nice apartment, and basically get to do whatever I want, like play music, eat Thai food and screw around all day.

Last night Dibs and I prepared a delicious meal at home. We have been actively trying to eat at home more in the last few weeks. I didn’t get a second job so I could spend it all in restaurants, after all. Turns out I will be spending it all on increasingly expensive groceries, at least until we start getting our bi-weekly Hearty Roots Farm produce pickups and I leave for the summer at Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic  farm, school and summer camp to work as a cook. Here’s to permaculture and living close to the food supply!

In preparation for eating dinner at home I paid a (guilty) visit to the Bowery Whole Foods, which is the most convenient grocery store to my workplace and subway line. Unfortunately, Whole Foods is, and always has been, goddamn expensive. Now that retailers have an excuse to bump up food prices, Whole Foods and everyone else did not delay in raising their prices on everything. So instead of the $20 I intended to spend to supplement this week’s rations, it was more like $35. I actually asked the clerk to remove a few items because I couldn’t justify spending the amount they asked ($1.43 for one small green apple, for example. Yes I know they are out of season. I am ashamed enough to have been shopping there in the first place.)

But anyhow, the prices have all gone up over there, and in addition there are an alarming number of visible security or “loss prevention” personnel all around the store, guarding the entranceways and stationed randomly throughout. (Probably where the cameras have the most trouble reaching.) This leads me to believe that Whole Foods has experienced, or expects to experience, an upswing in theft due to the upswing in food and gas prices, and a general state of despair over the economy. Very smart, those executives. I guess they didn’t get rich letting people eat for free. I was certainly tempted to cram several items down my pants, particularly a wedge of delicious aged gouda, a pricey tube of my favorite lavender-scented aluminum-free deodorant, and some vitamins which I didn’t end up buying. Alas, I was wearing a form-fitting ensemble with no pockets, which would bulge with my dinner soon enough.

We prepared a delicious summery salad, with mixed greens, orange bell pepper, carrot, tomato, mixed garden sprouts, and the aged gouda cheese. I mixed up a little salad dressing which was REALLY good and Dibs said was the gingeriest dressing he’d ever had outside of Dojo. It goes something like this:

juice of two lemons

2 tsp grated ginger, juice and all

2 tbsp soy sauce, tamari or Bragg’s

2 tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp olive or canola oil

a few dashes of rice vinegar

3 tsp turbinado sugar, dissolved in a bit of hot water

mix it all together and shake it up real good in a jar. I thought of adding sesame seeds too but thought too late. I think orange juice would also work very well.

We also ate roasted red bliss potatoes with dill, garlic, rosemary and olive oil, some sauteed Brussels sprouts in butter (mmmmmm) and some baked barbecue tempeh with scallions. We both ate heartily and have two containers of leftovers now.

Over dinner we discussed a lot of heavy topics, such as science, religion, graduate school, hypocrisy, staying inspired to change things for the better and amend exploitative habits and ways despite inevitable complicity in “the system,”Hakim Bey a.k.a. Peter Lamborn Wilson, and the kitty cat Roze’s behavior.

Meanwhile, all over the world, food riots are breaking out, children starve in countries where the food they produce is too expensive to buy, a volcano forces Chilean peasants to evacuate their homes, monsoons destroy Myanmar, war rages on in the Middle East, prisoners resume being executed by the United States of Amerikkka, and a generalized international mayhem and apocalypse seems to be clearly upon us. 2012 needs to goddang happen already so we can get on with things.

But never fear, I will continue to provide my readership with salad dressing recipes until in the not too distant future I can’t afford to use salad dressing, or a computer, anymore.