Psst .. Tim, there is a mistake in your hot dish recipe!

Cafe Society
1

As I am sure is the case for many of us, I am bombarded with fundraising requests from the Democrats. Well, I gave a chunk a while back and now I just ignore the entreaties.

But one that came in yesterday cracked me up so much that I decided, “okay, that was much cleverer than most appeals and it made me smile, so I’ll give 'em a few bucks.” It was an offer to receive Tim Walz’s Minnesota hot dish recipe in exchange for a donation.

Well, sorry, Tim, but there is a mistake in your recipe - something that any decent cook can spot and correct for, but still. A novice cook who blindly reads and follows the recipe step by step will end up with a problem:

INGREDIENTS
1 package brats
1 bottle beer
1 onion
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 cup chopped celery
1 can cream of cheddar soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 cup milk
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese
1 package tater tots

DIRECTIONS
Brina pot of water to a boil.
Add beer, onions, and garlic powder.
Submerge brats into the pot, reduce heat to medium, and cook for 10 minutes.
Remove and let cool.
Butter the casserole dish.
Combine remaining ingredients (minus the tots!) into a separate bowl.
Chop up the brats into bite-sized pieces and add to the other ingredients.
Pour the mixture into the casserole dish, top with tater tots, and bake for one hour at 350°.
Sprinkle with cheese for the last 10 to 15 minutes of baking.

I suppose the careless nature of the recipe, not to mention its impressive fat, sodium, and processed ingredient content, is part of the charm, mirroring as it does many a disturbing entry in the traditional community cookbooks of the sort schools, churches, and local associations have been using as fundraisers since forever.

Still, I’d probably have fixed it if I were in charge of that particular aspect of the campaign.

2

There’s a mistake in your OP - you never said what was wrong with the recipe.

3

I can’t figure out what you’re getting at. No instructions to take the brats out of the packaging? How big a package of brats is? How big a “pot of water” is? How big a casserole dish is? Open the cans of soup? I really have no idea what’s wrong here.

4

Some WAGs:

  • This is Tater Tot Casserole, not “Hot Dish,” whatever that is :slight_smile: .
  • The volume of water isn’t given. Different water volumes would change the flavor of the resulting “broth” used to cook the brats, although I’m sure it makes almost zero difference to the resulting final casserole. I’m sure the brats don’t absorb much of that flavor (a teaspoon of garlic powder? Seriously??) EDIT: This assumes the beer, garlic and onions go in the water to cook the brats. That sounds stupid but if those are supposed to be added into the soup mixture: :face_vomiting:
  • It doesn’t instruct the cook to rough chop / dice the onion before adding it to the liquid (which I assume any cook would know to do).
  • It says to add the cheese to the goopy soup mixture, but later it says to sprinkle the cheese on the top near the end. Choose your lane.
  • Since when does a recipe originating in Minnesota not have salt and sugar added to it?

I’m not sure what else I’m missing.

5

It doesn’t say to chop the onion, or whether the onion goes into the casserole.

No other useful details provided, e.g. package sizes, casserole sizes.

Sounds tasty enough, though it’ll pretty much kill you if you eat it more than once.

6

The onion is just for the poaching liquid so, no, it doesn’t need to be chopped nor go into the casserole, although chopping it would impart more flavor to it.

To be fair, that’s exactly the type of folksy recipe I’d expect to get from my mom’s or grandma’s cookbook, where you’re just expected to know how things go together and are not given a high level of detail.

7

Wow - I am surprised no one else sees the mistake. (@Smapti - I didn’t think I needed to spell it out!)

Okay folks, think this through:

You boil the brats in the water with the beer, onion and garlic powder, then let them cool.

Then you combine “remaining ingredients (minus the tots!)” in a bowl.

These are the remaining ingredients:

1 cup chopped celery
1 can cream of cheddar soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 cup milk
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese

So mix that together, add chopped brats, put it in a buttered casserole dish, and top with tots, and bake.

Now there is NO CHEESE left because, as the instructions told you to do, you’ve mixed it into a bowl with all the other “remaining ingredients.”

So where does the cheese come from in the “Sprinkle with cheese for the last 10-15 minutes of baking”?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d figure out a solution - my first instinct would be to “combine remaining ingredients through the milk,” then top with tots, bake 45 minutes, top with cheese, and bake for a final 10-15 minutes.

There are other alternatives - you could add a portion of the cheese and reserve the remainder for sprinkling on top, or you could add 1 cup of cheese and list an additional amount of cheese to be added at the end.

My point isn’t that the recipe presents an insoluble puzzle, just that it’s written with something less than the precision that is helpful to people who aren’t experienced in the kitchen. The ones most likely to try a hot dish recipe, for example.

8

::subtle cough::

9

Um, oops @Lancia. :smiling_face: I read - nay, merely skimmed - the responses too quickly. Obviously.

10

That final sprinkle is like seasoning. You’re just expected to have unlimited cheese around. :slight_smile: Put the cup of cheese in the goop, and put more cheese to finish.

11

Something tells me “but what if the cook only has one cup of shredded cheese on hand?” isn’t really a concern in that part of the country.

12

This is not the sort of food I usually make, especially now that my weight does not remain miraculously low as it did when I was in my 20s. But if/when the day comes that Harris and Walz are clearly and unmistakably the recognized winners, I’m gonna make this for a celebration party.

13

Well, that’s it then, I’m voting for trump. :smirk:

14

“Honey, we’re out of cheese” is a sentence that has never been uttered in the history of Minnesota.

15

Listen, it’s Minnesota. They play Duck, Duck, Gray Duck up there.

16

In the spirit of inquiry, I Googled.

Hotdish is an anything goes one-dish meal from the Upper Midwest, but it’s especially beloved in Minnesota and North Dakota. A creamy sauce binds three essential hotdish components together: starch, protein, and vegetable.

17

Right!? How the heck can we trust a man to help run the country when he can’t even manage cheese portions? Geez.

Someone pass me that MAGA hat…

18

Also, there was never any instruction to open the bottle of beer and pour it into the pot of water.

19

I mean, now the Vice Presidential Residence is going to smell like tater tots.

20

Here’s a hint for anyone else thinking of starting a thread; it’s never so obvious that you don’t need to spell it out. There will always be at least one person here who doesn’t get what is so obvious to you.