Sitting around eating some amazingly good cinnamon raisin bread from Great Harvest (the one on W. Saginaw) this morning, Chris starting ranting about how he’s wanted some Hot Dish all week and he’s going to make it right now. Hot dish? What on earth on you talking about?
He was (and probably still is) stunned that I’d never heard of this apparently ubiquitous Midwestern dish. As it turns out, he doesn’t actually know how to make it either so a short phone call to the family yielded not one but two recipes that qualify as Hot Dish.
One uses wild rice and mushrooms which I would have preferred to make but he really wanted the other, a tomato sauce and ground meat one.
So here it is, Aunt Harriet’s HotDish with some changes:
Ingredients
| The recipe as given: | My changes: |
| 1 1/2 lbs ground beef/chuck | 1.25 ground turkey, 92% lean |
| 1/2 tub cream cheese, softened | 1/2 tub cream cheese, softened |
| 4-5 bunches scallions | 2 bunches scallions |
| 2 cans Campbell’s Tomato Soup | 1 18oz package Campbell’s select tomato soup with basil & garlic |
| 1 package wide egg noodles | about 1/3 package extra wide egg noodles (Yoders) |
| Corn Flakes | Corn Flakes |
| Splash of Worcestershire | A little more than a splash |
| — | 1/2 yellow onion finely chopped, 2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste |
| — | smoked parpika, oregano |
| — | parmesan cheese |
Directions:
The directions from Aunt Harriet were pretty easy: brown the meat, drain then season with salt and pepper plus a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Mix meat with the tomato soup, green onions (which should be microwaved 3 minutes first), noodles and cream cheese in a casserole dish. Microwave 6 minutes then top with corn flakes and bake in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. There was something about mixing sliced almonds in too but I missed that part of the conversation and Chris didn’t want them anyway.
Okay, My Directions:
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add egg noodles and cook as directed. The Yoder noodles take 20 minutes so I did the rest of the work while they cooked.
Saute yellow onion and garlic over medium heat in 1 tablespoon of olive oil. After 5 minutes, add ground meat to the pan, cook until fully browned. Near the end of the cooking, I added about 1/2 teaspoon of smoked paprika. Next time I’ll double that. If necessary, drain the fat (not needed for 92% lean turkey).
While meat is cooking, slice green onions then microwave on high 2-3 minutes. Mix meat, green onions, tomato soup and softened cream cheese together with 1 teaspoon oregano and an 1/8 cup grated Parmesan cheese. Pour in to casserole pan, stir in drained noodles and sprinkle Worcestershire sauce over pan, maybe a tablespoon worth.
Bake in 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, covered in foil. Remove foil and cover top with corn flakes, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Return to oven for 10 more minutes. If you’d like to brown the corn flakes, you can turn the broil on briefly but watch carefully, they burn quick!
Notes & History:
Now that I’ve made this dish and Chris has been lapping it up (3 servings already), I figured I’d try to find out what a Hot Dish is or rather Hotdish. Lo and behold, it has its own entry on Wikipedia!
Hotdish is any of a variety of casserole dishes popular in the Midwest of the United States and especially in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and northern regions of Iowa.
It consists of a starch and a protein (meat and/or a vegetable) mixed together with a binding ingredient (most often canned soup or a sauce) and a topping.
Notice that Michigan is not on that list. And that Minnesota is, which is where Chris’s parents grew up. Interestingly, northern Iowa is also listed. My dad is from North Iowa so maybe he’s heard of Hotdish. We certainly had our share of casseroles while visiting grandma and all my aunts out in Iowa but I can’t recall ever hearing this term before.
Basically, its Hamburger Helper from scratch. Besides boosting the paprika a bit next time, I think I might try topping it with potato chips or sliced almonds next time. I’m not a big fan of corn flakes and their high fructose corn syrup.
Later this week, I’ll do the wild rice and mushroom one. We’ve already decided to modernize that one a bit by using fresh mushrooms instead of a can of ‘shrooms. It used to drive me crazy that my Iowa relatives relied so heavily on canned vegetables especially corn. No wonder people think the Midwest is boring: canned food, crazy jello/whipped cream “salads” and underseasoned foods cooked to death.
A couple of examples of Midwest cuisine I don’t really ‘get’:
- Stuffing, at grandma’s house was usually called dressing. I guess because it didn’t actually get stuffed in the bird. This stuffing/dressing, made with bread cubes, had become a formless mush of soggy bread that reminded me of paste with about the same flavor profile. Where is the sage and rosemary? Or the pieces of walnut and celery? Maybe some cranberries or mushrooms thrown in?
- Any dessert made from a jello mixed with a can of fruit and whipped cream. Or some combination of those three. Which is not to say that some of them aren’t tasty (a certain oreo cookie one comes to mind) but a funeral dinner I attended offered not one, not two but three versions of this salad dessert. Plus potato salad, coleslaw and macaroni salad- gotta love mayo!
- Corn casserole, eaten at the height of sweet corn season. In Iowa! Land of corn and pigs! I do like corn casserole when its not overly sweet. But I still recall a July visit with the family that involved a barbecue. I suggested we get some fresh corn and boil it up to go with our burgers and chicken. And my aunts were at a loss as to why one would want fresh corn when there are 4 cans of creamed corn in the pantry. (I remember this trip so well because I made a Honey Mustard-Soy marinade for the chicken that everyone was greatly impressed by. I made it with packets of Honey Mustard from McDonald’s and Soy Sauce from a Chinese take-out. I was in 9th grade.)
- Clam Soup made with milk, pepper and canned clams. I still give props to an ex-boyfriend of mine after he willingly and with beautifully acted gusto, shared a pot of this delicacy with my 80 year old grandmother. My mean dad sat there and watched the whole thing while graciously declining, after having been subjected to the stuff once too often I guess.
There is one foodstuff in my Iowa memory bank that may be Midwestern and may not be too healthy but really was delicious: Grandma’s biscuits. More like a roll than a biscuit, they were made for jam and honey or butter or Thanksgiving turkey leftovers or Sloppy Joes (more accurately referred to as Maid-Rites, while in Iowa). Or, probably best, fresh from the oven.
Good Food Hunting 
so that cream cheese stuff-got an idea for a substitute cause yuck, that sounds gross. I have made a similar dish using soy protein tho. similar to goulash I think on my tastebuds. I used Tomato Bisque soup cause it had chunks of tomatoes in it, and constituted with soy milk but not too much.
Yeah, gramma’s buiscuits, kinda like the sliced potatoe recipe my grampa made (with lard no less) and onions and sage and it got all creamy. And dessert was gramma’s shortbread-with lard again. Both from the lumberyards of Ontario via Europe.
I will not even go into the dishes from the farm as that is the main reason I no longer eat anything with eyeballs. consider yourself lucky!
You could use ricotta cheese, cottage cheese or even blended silken tofu. Its not a lot, compared to the rest of the ingredients. Just enough to smooth the sauce and make everything stick together.
This one is really a lot like goulash.
I loved Maid-Rite! I don’t think of Maid-Rites when I think of Sloppy Joes though. When my family made Sloppy Joes, it usually involved BBQ sauce. Maid-Rites make me think of loose meat sandwiches. I make them all the time at home with ground beef, paprika, worschestire sauce, and chicken stock. They’re delicious and taste almost the same.
I wasn’t a big fan of stuffing until last Thanksgiving. I worked at an ABC station at the time and watched Good Morning America just about every morning. They had a Stuffing Recipe contest and I decided to try the winner’s recipe. It was delicious. It wasn’t anything like my grandma would ever make or that crappy stuff you get out of a box. I was surprised I actually liked stuffing.
When we’re talking Midwest food the two things I think of Horseshoe’s (only available in Central Illinois) and Italian Beef (a Chicago specialty)
Good point, Maid-Rites are more like loose-meat. Its been a long time since I’ve had them, I couldn’t remember what the pot of filling looked like.
Now see, for me, stuffing is the best part of Thanksgiving, when its done right. And it should be a little dry with distinct cubes of bread after baking. Because you can add gravy over it to make it moist!