That does look good, except instead of frozen green beans and corn, I’d like to try an O’Brien version, chopping up red & green peppers and cooking them with the ground beef and onion, keeping the rest of the recipe the same. Would that be sacrilege to a Minnesotan?
With the exception of Long Island, your next door neighbor on the north side of you lives upstate. For some reason Long Island is excluded, and even though I lived further south in Westchester than much of Long Island I was living upstate and they weren’t. Downstate is confusing though, sometimes excluding all of NYC. So someone living in Yonkers lived downstate from most everywhere else, but Duh Bronx was in the city, so not downstate?? Oh, except once I heard someone in Manhattan say Staten Island was definitely downstate.
I think ( although I can’t be sure) that that is partly because people from Long Island driving to Westchester will usually go through NYC* and partly because a lot of people’s mental maps have Long Island going due east of NYC (rather than northeast.)
- there are ferries to Connecticut but there are probably a limited number ( if any) of Long Island/Westchester trips where taking a ferry to Connecticut is faster than driving through NYC*
My mental maps have Long Island heading south from NYC. And I’ve lived in NYState most of my life, and have been to Long Island.
That particular bit of mental map just doesn’t seem convinced by the maps. – maybe because, from where I grew up in Dutchess County, in order to go to Long Island we had to go south first?
I think you’re right about the due east part. They think of the south shore and north shore. And to be fair, not that much of it is north of NYC. And at first, similar to thorny_locust, I thought of the island as heading southeast from NYC in some illogical manner, because I had to travel south to get there.
When I lived in SOHO, anything north of Houston Street was “Upstate.” 
Soup is the essential ingredient that makes it a hot dish. I’ve had chicken hot dish, but beef is more common. My mother regularly made one with canned tuna, rice, onion, carrot, and yes, cream soup. She didn’t like topping it, but the recipe called for mashed up potato chips (Old Dutch brand, of course).
I doubt it. It wouldn’t be the same tater tot hotdish - but one of the things about hotdish is that you can make it out of stuff in your pantry and freezer when you are snowed in - its flexible because it needs to be practical.
Sodapop isn’t used by kids, more like old ladies with names like Mildred, Constance, and Gertrude!
(To me anyway!)
As mentioned with ‘gitches’ aforethread, I notice young kids using older folks’ slang that is uncommon among the middle-aged.
Probably confirmation bias.
Edited to add: I can’t wait until those kind of names come back into fashion…
When I was a teenager moving from Oregon to California, I didn’t realize not everybody called JoJos, “JoJos.” Instead they had banal descriptor names like “potato wedges.” pff
What a goddam adorable name for potato wedges. I think I will steal that, and forevermore from this day forward refer to potato wedges as “JoJos”.
Have you ever been to California? You can buy all kinds of alcohol at any grocery store, although specialized liquor and wine stores do exist as well.
Thanks, interesting article! @garygnu pointing out the Jojo thing and this subsequent article post make a great contribution to this thread. It’s why I love coming here.
So the Jojo is ‘definitely not a potato wedge’, eh? At least, not just a potato wedge. The plot thickens. I’m really tempted to go off this annoying low-carb diet I’ve been on since the new year and try making a batch of these…
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to learning what a jojo is. As soon as I read this " ‘A true jojo is a potato wedge that’s been breaded, pressure fried and spiced,’ says Paul Nicewonger" (great name by the way) I knew these are not for me. I love potatoes. I don’t see any reason to bread a potato or spice it; just salt and butter it and eat! Really, to me, there is hardly any food that is improved by being breaded.
I’m sorry, as someone currently on a low-carb diet, this statement does not compute. It would be like a very thirsty person complaining that the oasis they just found is too darn wet 
When i worked in the office in the B.C. time, there was a nearby restaurant that specialized in breakfast, and they made these cubed hash browns that were like crack. I’m a pretty good cook, and I’ve never made hash browns that were half as tasty. I suspect the restaurant was breading, spicing and frying their hash brown chunks.
All the jojos I’ve ever had were not what you’d think of by reading “breaded”. They have a very thin coating which mostly looks like seasoning. They’re not drastically different than potato wedges. I haven’t had them very often, though, so my experience is fairly limited.
Yeah, that’s my experience as well. The “breading” is mainly spices mixed with a little flour. Not heavy at all.
The term ‘Jojo’ is not common around here. There was one chicken place selling potato wedges as Jojs, I don’t have much exposure to other Jojos to compare them to, but they were obviously baked, and not really the same thing as a Broasted potato.
I’ve never heard of “Jojos,” but when there used to be a Shakey’s Pizza around here, they had what they called “Mojo Potatoes.”