bootjack

i started making hotdishes for fun back in like 2017 or something and find them to be a pretty good dish to make in winter, and have been making small variations on the classic recipe that i think taste pretty good and is a fine, filling meal for cold weather. it's one of my favorite things to make as winter is one of my favorite seasons (at least the part where the weather gets Actually Cold and isn't just gloomy dark muddy sludge as it typically is here in the pacific northwest).

a funnier person than i would probably make one of those alignment charts regarding what constitutes a hotdish. i'm not even from minnesota so i'm not the right person to be gatekeeping what is or isn't hotdish and this is just my interpretation of it. a minnesotan might even read this and decide to throw me out of a plane for suggesting that you could add taco bell sauce and peas to the recipe because there is clearly something wrong with me and this is an affront to the social order (i'm autistic and affronting the social order is my entire reason to exist, so yeah). anyway, hotdish is sort of like a shepherd's pie where you swap out the mashed potatoes with tater tots and it's really fun and relatively easy to make. at its most basic components, hotdish consists of a protein, a vegetable, and a sauce baked into a casserole. the most standard hotdish is made up of ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, a can of corn, and a can of green beans mixed together in a glop and topped with tater tots baked in an oven for about an hour. this is the recipe we'll be building on today, because there's extra little ways to zazz it up that i've found to be pretty tasty.

THIS IS NOT A NORMAL RECIPE POST

because of the highly personalized and interpretable nature of hotdish, i've made a guide instead of a normal recipe with ingredient lists and steps because that's just how my brain works. the way i wrote it is sort of in a way where the steps are in order. if you want an actual recipe with ingredient lists and steps, there are plenty to find online and just about every single one is different and has some variables and that's why i'm leaving it open-ended. the hotdish is a canvas and whatever's in your kitchen is the paint. or something. look, i'm not doing this for SEO and i'm pretty sure search indexing is turned off for this blog anyway. i just have a weird brain and like writing about stuff.

THE STUFF YOU'RE NOT EATING

i don't know if this section is really needed, but you'll want some sort of casserole dish to put all this stuff in. i use a regular ol' pyrex glass baking pan. make sure it's big enough to hold everything and has handles so you can take it out of the oven. if you have linoleum countertops you'll want to put a towel down when you take your hotdish out of the oven so it doesn't get damaged by the heat. you probably already know all this. i'm just writing this down so someone doesn't get mad at me because they thought they could bake a hotdish on a cookie sheet and then their oven got overrun with glop and tots because they put a casserole on a cookie sheet. please do not be the person that puts a casserole on a cookie sheet. the dish should at least be two inches deep.

THE BEEF

properly zazzing up the beef while it's browning is central to making a truly excellent hotdish. make sure it's fully thawed and close to room temperature before browning, it cooks better that way. my personal favorite additions include adding chopped onions, worcestershire sauce, and at least one packet of taco bell fire sauce while browning. drain the fat before adding it to the casserole dish. i typically use about 1.5 pounds at a time for no reason other than how it's packaged at the store in those little two-pack bricks of meat. one of those bricks is 1.5 pounds. if it's sold in one of those sausage roll things, just cut the roll in half. freeze the other half for later or use it for something else (or just make another hotdish if the first one you make gets devoured and you want more).

_{CAN I USE SOMETHING OTHER THAN BEEF? yeah you can, however i don't have any personal experience making hotdish with other stuff than good ol' ground beef. obviously, you know yourself and your kitchen acumen best if you're asking this and what would go best with ground turkey or chicken or, idk, venison. i intend to try making one with TVP at some point just to familiarize myself with it as an ingredient and i'll update this post when i do. go look up tim walz's hotdish recipes if you want some more ideas, the man gets freaky with it.}

_{WHAT ABOUT SEASONING? use whatever you feel would be best! that's what i use the fire sauce for but if you don't have fire sauce you can use just about anything savory. garlic powder, chili powder, pepper, whatever.}

THE CONDENSED SOUP

cream of mushroom is the standard choice, but you can try out cream of chicken or cream of celery if you're into that. i find that campbell's tastes best but if your store brand condensed soup tastes good to you then go on ahead and use that if you want. i'd advise against using the reduced sodium variants unless you want your hotdish to taste kind of sad and flavorless and you have to drown it in taco bell sauce just to feel something. you need the regular, original soup here. i usually just use one can but if you're a freak that likes it sloppy with the sauce, use two cans or get the jumbo size can.

THE VEGETABLES

right, so, there's really no wrong way to do this. everyone has their own preferences for vegetables and what they like or don't like. me, i like vegetables, so i'll add more than just the green beans and corn. i like adding onions (cooked during the browning phase), sliced carrots, and peas in addition to the aforementioned green beans and corn. if you're using canned vegetables, make sure they're drained. if you're using frozen vegetables, make sure they're thawed (and drained). they can be thawed pretty quickly in the microwave, dump them in a big bowl and add some water and cover and heat it up for however many minutes and do that while the beef is browning if you want to m-m-m-multitask. if you're using fresh vegetables, uh... wash them first and chop them up? i find fresh and (thawed) frozen vegetables to have better texture than canned, and if i'm using canned, i try to go for no sodium added because i have high blood pressure and don't like lots of salt. other than the onions, which need to be cooked while browning the beef, you don't need to do anything special here.

oh yeah, you should probably start to preheat the oven by this point. set it to 400 degrees and let it start to do its thing while you create...

THE GLOP

once you have your beef browned, your vegetables ready, and your can(s) of condensed soup popped open, it's time to create what i call THE GLOP. dump all the ingredients into the casserole dish and mix it all together with one of those silicone spatulas until it's evenly glopped up into a wet mass of condensed soup, ground beef, and veggies. making THE GLOP is what i consider to be the most fun part of making the hotdish because you are indulging your inner child that likes to mix food together in a way your parents would frown at you for. if you like having extra dishes to clean i suppose you can make THE GLOP in a large bowl before transferring it to the casserole dish, but i hate making more shit to clean than i absolutely have to so i just do it all in the baking pan. once your glop is nice and evenly mixed, smooth it out with the spatula so it's nice and pretty. the oven should be close to preheated by now. you're almost ready.

TOPPING IT OFF

with your nice smooth glop, it's time to dump an absolute ton of cheese over the mess. cheddar is the gold standard, but i like using fistfuls of shredded mexican cheese because i'm a party boy. i'm sure any cheese will do, use whatever you've got in the fridge, it's mostly there to be delicious glue to keep the tater tots on. nothing really special to add about this stage. make sure the cheese is evenly distributed and then grab fistfuls of tater tots out of the bag to line up over your beautiful creation until it's fully covered wall to wall in tots. you could also make it without cheese and only have the tots on top but where's the fun in that? OPTIONAL: add bacon crumbles to the cheese before adding the tots.

the oven should be done preheating by now. pop that bad boy in and set your timer to 45 minutes to an hour. i like my tots crispy so i don't bother covering it, i've personally never had any problems with it drying out so i've never felt the need to cover. i use one of those countertop ovens so ymmv if you use a regular oven for this. go do something else for a while. get distracted and forget you're cooking something until you hear the loud, insistent beep of the oven telling you to come get your man (dish). the tots should be crispy and golden brown. let that thing cool for a while so you don't burn your mouth. enjoy the magic of creating a pretty good and hearty meal out of essentially just stuff in your pantry and share it with your loved ones. it's great. hotdish is a fun thing to make and i find it to be pretty forgiving if you want to experiment with it. the variations are just about endless. be a little freak with it, it's there for you to make it to your exact specifications and tastes.

BUT WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

i'm glad you asked! i posted some pictures of my most recent hotdish over on bluesky.

just a small update, if you've read my michipicoten post and have a mild interest in questionable shipping companies operating on the great lakes:

another ship in the lower lakes towing fleet has had her sorry ass dragged into drydock after a mishap out on lake superior. the reason?

the fucking front rudder fell off.

per boatnerd:

The Robert S. Pierson arrived at Fraser Shipyards early Tuesday and went right into the drydock after being towed from Goulais Bay, near Sault Ste. Marie, ON, by the tug Avenger IV. Although nothing official has been released, waterfront reports indicate the Pierson lost her rudder in the vicinity of Gros Cap more than a week ago.

one has to wonder how the fuck a ship's rudder just falls off like that. i have many questions, and much like what happened with the michipicoten, the company that owns the ships hasn't said a word. and like the michipicoten, the weather didn't appear to be all that bad when the rudder fell off. and to be honest, i'm still wrapping my dumb head around the whole how the fuck does a ship of that size's rudder just fall off thing, because that generally is not supposed to happen! those things don't just come off that easily because they are critical to the basic operation of a ship! i suspect we aren't about to find out why the rudder came off any time soon, because there isn't even a news article about this yet unless you count the boatnerd post. and if you're a weirdo like me who keeps an eye on stuff like this, it's pretty hard to ignore a 630 foot ship getting painstakingly dragged into port by tugboats in the middle of the night^[1] and not hear someone say something because people fucking love their funky ships and coming out to see what the proverbial dog is doin' no matter how ungodly the hours.

with the cuyahoga, michipicoten, and now the robert s. pierson in layup, lower lakes towing now has half of their entire (aging, dubiously maintained) fleet undergoing some sort of major repair and leaving them with only three ships remaining in operating condition. relatively speaking, the pierson is one of the younger ships on the fleet having been built in 1974^[2]. we're about to get into the toothiest stretch of the shipping season in terms of inclement weather, especially in a la nina year where northern winters tend to be more intense, especially with climate change putting its treacherous thumb on the scales. i'm not a betting man, but if we end up getting another tragic loss of life and ship on the great lakes in the possibly very near future i would not at all be surprised to learn if that ship's livery turns out to be grey and white.

_{1: i'm a little disappointed that duluth harbor cam didn't clip the pierson's arrival, but it entered through the superior, WI entry which doesn't have a very good camera at night. someone did get some nice pictures of the tug escort's arrival on facebook, though.}

_{2: ships on the great lakes tend to skew positively ancient by maritime standards, given that they operate strictly in fresh water and thus have long working lives compared to oceangoing ships. as i noted in the michipicoten post, there are ships dating back to the 1940s that are still working to this day and even older ships that have been converted into barge hulls and live on with a dedicated tugboat cradled into their sterns to propel them. it was a pretty big deal when the mark w barker launched in 2022 because she was the first ship built on the great lakes in 40 years, with the prior-most recent ship having been built in 1983.}

years of self-imposed isolation and loneliness in response to the generally hostile attitudes displayed on social media towards trans and neurodivergent creators has taken its toll on me, and i want to reclaim some of that space for myself again. as twitter is in its death throes and is now acting as the internet's septic tank for all of the worst clout-chasing, reactionary ghouls while the more better-adjusted people move onto greener (bluer?) pastures, and sites like cohost have proven that there is still room on the internet for the people like me who don't truly fit in anywhere - something i wish i'd taken advantage of sooner, well before its closure, but i didn't realize just how fucked up i'd been by the overall downward trajectory of social media and the toxicity of its long-term inhabitants.

i've never been the most outgoing person and have severe social anxiety, and yet i miss being able to meet and connect with people. a lot of the time i feel less like a person and more like a wild animal living on the fringes of society, just out of sight of most people and not wanting to attract attention to myself lest i take the chance of someone seeing me as a varmint and shoots at me with pellet guns or tries to run me down with their truck. this mentality has eroded so much of my sense of self away that i no longer really know who i am or what i want to be seen as. my form is malleable, my mask poorly made and never holding form. these days i feel like little more than a pair of eyes and a shadow peering at everyone else from the tall grass off the side of the road.

i have things i want to draw, stories i want to tell, but every time i plug in my tablet and open my art software, i'll create a blank canvas and then just stare into it, not knowing what to put down. same for my writing - i'll open my word processor, start a new document, and then just stare at the blank page. i know the ideas are there but they won't come out. i start getting anxious. i close the program. i resume scrolling reddit^[1] or whatever other hellsite i've chosen to look at that day.

because ask boxes don't exist on bluesky and cohost has only days before it goes into read only mode, i may do a pinned post on here that's just a general catch-all prompt box where people can submit stuff in the comments (with some loose guidelines on what to expect and what not to expect - don't ask me to draw fanart for something i've never seen, request extremely specific creative control that's best reserved for paid commission work, etc). i might post a little more about my OCs so y'all have a clearer idea of who they are; actually i think that might be a good place to start. these grimy li'l fuckers have existed in my head and only my head (and made into second life avatars, i guess) for years but i have never posted about them anywhere. i want to write a stories about them going on gay adventures and i think it would be pretty neat if people read those gay adventures. i still get email notifications from ao3 on fanfiction i wrote a decade ago so i know my writing isn't bad and that it still resonates with people, i just have to find my footing again and have something to put out there.

^{[1]: yeah. i know. you know it's bad when your preferred choice for places to scroll these days is fucking reddit because everywhere else has become an algorithm-driven cognitohazard that makes your anxiety worse. i'll take dweebs arguing about weed or cat pictures over reading about the latest transphobic nightmare policy some GOP senator has proposed or whatever nazi conspiracy bullshit is tumbling around the nazi conspiracy bird website. this extends to bluesky because some people just can't help bringing over screenshots of the bags of shit on twitter, pointing at it and going "look at this bag of shit i saw on the bag of shit website, guys!" no. stop it. i want to get away from twitter bullshit! i do not care what the nazis are doing at the nazi bar, please stop shoving this bag of shit in my face! and then i close the tab because i get annoyed and don't want to fall into doomscrolling pits.}