Whats Fa Dinna?

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.