Hotdish...

My judge has been on the bench 20 years this year. To celebrate the milestone, his office is holding what sounds like an awfully nice reunion weekend for the Judge and all his clerks in Fargo in mid-July. Timing will be a little challenging -- I wrap up my bar review class the Monday before, my brother Dan's wedding is in Austin the following weekend, and then I have the bar exam three days later! But it sounds like something I'm not going to want to miss.

Part of the invitation is a request for "any stories about 'new' words/sayings/ideas you learned while living in Fargo, such as: What is a hotdish?"

What is a hotdish? I wrote back asking for clarification, which my future Fargo colleague found hilarious. Since I wanted an actual answer, I also looked in the Wikipedia, which as it turns out, has a full entry on hotdish, beginning with:
Hotdish is any of a variety of casserole dishes popular in the Midwest of the United States, and especially the state of Minnesota and its environs. It consists of a starch, a meat and a vegetable, mixed together along with some type of sauce.I love the Wikipedia. The entry contains a nice, dry "disambiguation" section: "While hotdish typically refers to the Minnesotan casserole described in this article, hot dish (written as two separate words) generally refers to any meal or item of cuisine that has been heated. This usage, needless to say, is sharply deprecated in Minnesota."

Toward the bottom of the entry, they have a recipe for Tater Tot Hotdish:This quick-and-dirty hotdish is made by browning hamburger meat, combining it with a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup (can also be made with cream of chicken soup) and some vegetables, placing the filling in a casserole, topping it all off with Tater Tots, and baking it at a "reasonable temperature" (i.e., 350 degrees) until it "smells done."This sounds delicious to me, and Jen, who is not really as nice as everyone thinks, says, "Your dad would be appalled... we should try it for him."

The Wikipedia also notes, "Cream of mushroom soup is so ubiquitous in hotdish that it is often referred to in such recipes as Lutheran Binder, referring to hotdish's position as a staple of Lutheran-church cookbooks."

While searching for a picture of a hotdish, I stumbled across a religious war, mostly concerning whether the tater tots go on top of, or underneath, the rest of the ingredients.

"You can find all of these items at your local grocery store and/or in your kitchen cupboard," says the under-the-ingredients author. "This task is immensely easier in rural Wisconsin than in, say, Greenwich Village; they practically sell all these items together in a blister-packed kit back home."

Here is a photo essay on hotdish preparation, and although the pictures are beautiful, the author used "tofu/protein fake beef instead of the real deal." Ugh.

Hotdish has also inspired art, in this case, poetry:I once had a housemate from Manitowoc,
who made us a hot dish out of tater tots.
I'd forgotten 'til now,
that it made me wish how,
she had stayed north of Oconomowoc....which brings all this kind of full circle, since Jen's whole family is from Wisconsin's Two Rivers/Manitowoc metropolitan area (and it's where we got married!).