Quick, Filling Meal - Bring on the Pasta

Pasta is my oasis. Don't know what to cook - make a pasta. Extreme hunger - make a pasta. Have leftover vegetables and half-used tomato sauces in fridge - make a pasta. Don't know how to cook - make a pasta!

Maybe pasta won me over by growing up in a large family. The easiest (and in some cases, most nutritious) meal my mom could prepare for five hungry mouths was pasta. And, she was good at it. My mouth still waters when I think of her homemade spaghetti, fettuccine and mostacholli. I now realize that some of our pasta consumption probably stemmed from the fact that it is also a very affordable meal to make. If you omit the meat - which I find to be a real shame - it's even more affordable.

Over the years, my tastes have evolved. I have stepped away from a majority menu listing of pasta. This was for a few reasons: (1) I started get sick of it, (2) My waistline told me to stop and (3) I wanted to be more adventurous and healthy with my food choices. All that said, at the end of the day if I don't know what to make (or if I am craving something) it is usually pasta. Must be the Italian in me. :)

One of the best recent discoveries I've stumbled upon has revamped my pasta repertoire. A few months back my brother rocked our world with what he's loving coined "White Trash Risotto." And, what is this? Well, it's a risotto made with pasta. It's the blue collar man's risotto. Fear not, there will be photos, recipes and conversation to be had on this topic. If you can't wait that long (and trust me, I don't know that I could), you basically prepare a risotto dish using orzo pasta instead of the risotto.)

Anyway, before I digress too much on pasta types, I want to go back to the growing up in a large family bit. Being part of a big family could often present problems at the dinner table. Lucky for us (mostly for my parents) none of us were very  picky eaters. While there were certainly times when it would be hard for all of us kids to agree on a dish, there was one pasta dish my mom was constantly asked to prepare: pizza hot dish. This meal made it's way to our dinner table at least once every couple of weeks. (Sometimes, it was every week). It was always requested by a different kid and since we all loved it, there weren't any complaints from the chef.

A pizza hot dish? First off, if you're not from the Midwest you may be wondering what the hell a hot dish is. Well, it is exactly that -- it's a hot dish. A dish that you prepare and then put in the oven to bake. The dish comes out hot. Get it - hot dish? Other popular hot dishes include ones using tater tots (of which we rarely had, le sigh) or vegetables. In my opinion, pizza hot dish is the best of them. It's essentially baked spaghetti, only it has a lot more cheese. And, growing up in the Dairy State, cheese was always on the table.

Oh, pasta.... Can you guess what I'll be eating for dinner?

The recipe for the famous "pizza hot dish":

• Brown ground beef
• Onion, diced
• Garlic (2-3 cloves)brown these all.  Some people add bacon to his for a bit of flavor. 
• 1 jar of tomato sauce (homemade is best)
• Noodles

Brown the first three ingredients. Add bacon for additional flavor, if desired. Boil noodles. Mix all ingredients. Add parmesan cheese. Heat the oven and cover dish with mozzarella cheese. Bake for 30 minutes.

Revenge Hot Dish.

I was a finicky eater when I was little. I had this “thing” about meat, and that thing was that it made me literally sick to my stomach to look at it. Aversion to meat and poultry was a tiny bit problematic because we lived on a farm. Beef, chicken, and venison were “free”, you see, and my parents were young parents living on a shoe string budget. Unforch for me, just because their eldest daughter didn’t like the look, smell, or taste of animal flesh didn’t mean we didn’t eat it often.

 Even when I was around 5 or 6, I remember being bothered that my parents insisted I eat meat. My dad, a hunter and fisher type, especially seemed aggressive in his demands I “eat what’s on my plate”. I wondered why they seemed to enjoy torturing me by forcing me to eat things I didn’t like. I mean, really, what had I ever done to them? I mean aside from the time I tried to flush an entire hamburger down the toilet…and the time I vomited liver back onto my plate. Besides that, what?

 I distinctly remember the one occasion when dad made me “try” liver. It was indeed scene from the Dinner of Revenge. However, instead of being left at the table long after everyone else was finished until I finally caved in and took a bite, I had a different approach.

 “One bite”, he demanded, and so I lifted up the fork, bit off a piece of liver, swallowed without biting it, and then immediately barfed it back up onto my plate. That was my first and last bite of liver. In later years, dad and I would battle it out over hamburgers (me: “can’t you just make them flat like McDonald’s does?!?!” True quote.), venison, and pork chops.

 Eventually, my mom got tricky on me: she started making hot dishes. If you’ve never tried picking each tiny hamburger chunk out of Hamburger Helper, then I’m here to tell you it isn’t worth it. Fortunately, hot dishes did make it easier to get meat down, as it is hard to taste much of anything that is mixed with a can of Cream of Mushroom soup. Some hot dish meals I loathed were tuna casserole and all Hamburger Helper meals. Warmed tuna sets off my gag reflex to this day, and like Hamburger Helper, it’s extremely difficult to separate out flakes of tuna from the other things in there because they all stick together. Despite my repeated protests that I absolutely, positively, do not like eating Hamburger Helper, Mommy!!!!!, it still continued to appeared on the dinner table without fail.

 Yet there was one hot dish I didn’t mind eating. It was a little delicacy my mom would often cook up called “Booger Hot dish”. It was a hot dish that not just my mom made, but all my aunts had on rotation too. If I went to one of my aunt’s house and told her I wanted Booger Hot dish for lunch, she wouldn’t think I was being a disgusting little smart ass, she would know what I meant, and probably already have leftovers of it stockpiled in the fridge. Booger hot dish was this: cooked hamburger, rice, cream of mushroom, and soy sauce, mixed and baked. I never thought to ask why it was called Booger Hot dish. It’s one of those memories you can have that is so embedded in your very being that you don’t even question the oddness of it. Booger Hot dish simply was Booger Hot dish. So, maybe I liked it because it had a funny name? Or maybe I liked it because I couldn’t actually see the hamburger in it and it just tasted like salt. So with Booger hot dish, my mom and aunts had found a winner. Everyone loved it. My sisters, my cousins, we were all willing to eat it and plus, it was cheap.

 As I got older and my parents started making a little more money, hot dishes became less common. By the time I was in high school, I really don’t remember eating hot dishes at all, aside from the odd Tator-Tot hot dish that might appear in the Church basement.

 One summer when I was in college, I was browsing through one of my mom’s cookbooks and I spotted the worn and stained recipe for Booger Hot dish.

 “MOM!” I yelled all excitedly, “Booger Hot dish! You haven’t made this in SUCH a long time!"

 “I haven’t been angry at your dad in a long time”, she replied, “He hated that hot dish”.

*see how my Mom spelled it "Buger"? HA! 

Can I please just sit with the ADULTS?

Oh family holidays. Love them or hate them - they happen every year at the same time. Family doesn't change, and in my case - neither did the food or the questions.

Don't get me wrong, I did always enjoy making the 6 hour trip up the Cities to visit family for the holidays. The main reason was because of my cousin. After the questioning about boyfriends we did or did not have - or were or were not happy with - we at least could escape together and digress from the Spanish Inquisition.

See, the problem of being a 'tweener' cousin is that I was too young to hang out with the 4 cousins outside of my age group, and way too old to be caught dead with the youngsters. This is where Jess and Ang enters the equation. You could also refer to our immediate connection as "cousin sanity." Basically outside of our own siblings, of whom we saw enough of already, we had no one but each other to chill with. This means we went through the awkward aunt sex talk when we were 15 and knew full well all about the damn flowers and the bees, talked everyone's ear off about how school was, how lame being in the band was together... you get the drift. Clearly, it wasn't time for the others to have these conversations. We were the next in line. And it sure felt like every holiday it was the same record. (This was good actually - little prep was necessary). :)

This 'tweener' classification led to unfortunate circumstances at holidays. There was enough room at the adult table for holidays for us to sit. Having more than 20 aunts and uncles, not to mention the 35 some cousins we have - made that graduation nearly impossible. Instead - it was the kids table for us. This meant watching cousins eat way too much marshmallow jello, blowing soda pop out of their noses and my personal favorite - starting the table on fire with the candles.

We just wanted to sit at the goddamn adult table. They clearly were having way more fun (we later discovered allchie helps!) and were talking about more important things than the Teenage Mutant Turtles and their boogers. If not with the adults - then come on - how about the actual teenager table? Even if they scared us with their wisdom, or so we thought... we were mature and hip at 12 too. Come on!

The other main problem of being a tweener was having to WAIT in the congo line for food. Yes, it was always buffet style. So after all the little urchins touched everything, licked everything and cleaned the place out. Well, not really - but it felt that way. At least there were always the staples - green bean casserole, marshmallow veggie jello, olives, buns. Sometimes I feel like that is all we ever ate. It was amazing how fast the sides and meat would fly away from the buffet line. Don't even get me started on the dessert. (Okay - fine. I remember one year for Thanksgiving for the 50+ people eating there were 4 pies. 4 fricking pies! They were not even homemade. *s*. We opted for spiking our koolaid that year. I think that was a fine option).

For having so many cousins and aunts/uncles- the house was always crowded. In fact, once you entered the line for the buffet (of which could take 15 minutes to move) there was no turning back. Get your plate and then scoot. Once you either sat in the many card tables arranged around the first floor, the kitchen "kids" table, or the frosty porch there was no moving. Forgot butter - tough shit. It was impossible to move around in that house when it was feeding time at the zoo - impossible. Seconds, what were seconds? Naturally jello and marshmallow mush. Other than that - good luck.

Not that this post makes much sense - and if anything it is only bringing to mind even more crazy memories. Nonetheless, holidays were always a good time. Thank the stars above that I did not have to face them alone.

There's No More Room for Jello

It's basically a fact of life that food defines the holidays. However, when you grow up in an extraordinarily big family, scrap food kind of defines the holidays. I can remember the first holiday gathering I brought up the caboose of the buffet line. Not a smart move when 32 cousins have already passed ahead of you. Aunts and Uncles, yes, them too. But they don’t matter quite as much, as adults and children have completely different palettes, you see. The adults grazing the Thanksgiving buffet table tend to gravitate towards plates the kids could care less about. No more of Grandma’s green bean casserole, which she only makes on this sole day every year, with green beans and onions from Grandpa’s garden which have been picked and stored with care until this very day? Meh, no biggie. No more pickles or after dinner mints left? Now we have a problem.

As I brought up the back of the line, passing up silver platters with mere crumbs left on them and china bowls scraped clean, I spotted a beacon of red gelatin splendor: “A Jell-o mold! I love Jell-o! How did those fools pass this up!”, I thought to myself, giggling with delight. I added it to my plate of pickles and after dinner mints, and picked up a bun for good measure.

Ah, now, where to sit to enjoy this fine spread? Seating also is a complicated process. The grown ups sit in the dining room with the china and wine and having, what I imagined at the time, amazing adult conversation about the good old days, and maybe about sophisticated things such as Aristotle (he was the one who invented T.V., right?) or The Beatles (i loved The Beatles). Or perhaps, gasp!, they were already planning where we would all have our summer vacation together! (That’s what I really liked to imagine.)

Being 11 or so at the time, I clearly didn’t fit into the adult table. The next option was the kids table. Again, somewhere that I didn’t feel as though I belonged, and I certainly didn’t have as many romantic notions about what took place there. I knew what took place there. I had sat there for 11 years, babysitting my 5 year old sister and cousins because “I was the older one”. It was a bit like an unsatisfying job: you hate being there, and just when you are about to pull a “fuck you, fuck you, I’m out” to the boss, he will come over and sing his praises about how “responsible” and “great” you are to be” helping out”. How utterly unsatisfying, but it keeps you there until the next breakdown.

There was a bit of a purgatory, but it was a place you had no option to visit: the Teenager’s Table. A cardboard table set up in the entry way, where they dined together and talked about tantalizing topics such as “high school” and “dating”….that’s what I imagined, anyway. And, now that I’m older, it was a place where I’m sure they pulled out their hip flasks out to give Aunt Alice’s Holiday Punch a little more “spirit”, if you will. How do I know this? Because it’s exactly what I did where I was finally old enough to sit at the cardboard table.

Back to the Jell-o: I went in line expecting Glorified Rice, and I ended up with Jell-o! Hallelujah! The first bite was heavenly; there isn’t much to say because it was Jell-o…it really only has one taste. But I will say the maraschino cherry I scored in the first bite did add a little something special. As I slurped the second spoonful into my mouth, I hit something. As in, I hit something that couldn’t just be sucked down -- it needed to be chewed. “What the…..?” I thought to myself, and took the bite. Celery?! I spit it out and examined my slice of the Jell-o mold: cherries, yes. All that other canned cocktail fruit, yes. But, wait….what was this? What was this green stuff? Why in hell was there celery in my Jell-o?

I consulted with my mom.
“Uh, mom…why is there celery in the jell-o?”
“Oh, your grandma made that!”
“So…why did she put celery in the jell-o?”
“It’s just her recipe”
“So….she, like, did that on purpose….or….?”
“Yeah, it’s just the way she makes it”
“Oh. Ummm…why?”

I took a moment to reflect. Apparently my grandmother was senile and she actually thought celery in Jell-o made sense or something. That made me feel kind of bit depressed, because everyone knows the first stage of death is losing your mind. I sighed a tragic sigh if ever there was a thing, and got back in line. Maybe there was some Glorified Rice left.


A couple Thanksgivings later with Celery Jell-o still making an appearance, I realized the celery in the Jell-o was no mistake; it was just part of the recipe. And now it’s become the Thanksgiving staple that I never eat.

Grandma Marcella’s Fruit Cocktail and Celery Jell-o:

2 package cherry flavored Jell-o
1 bunt cake mold
2 cans fruit cocktail
1-2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped

Prepare Jell-o according to directions. Add cocktail fruit, drained. Add celery pieces. Stir. Chill in refrigerator until set. Flip mold onto serving platter. Serve to unsuspecting relatives.