In our house this is known as a “mousetrap”, and they’re delicious!
“Hotdish” (I know that’s just a midwestern term for a casserole)
1 lb browned hamburger, added to 1 box of prpares fried rice rice-a-roni, at tle last minute add 1 can of corn and warm through. If you wanna be fancy, you can season with ketchup.
Skins on is an extra layer of yum for tattie scones.
Seconding marmite & cheese grilled on toast as “mousetraps”. Hmm… checking the pantry… hurrah!
I haven’t tried these yet, but they are a future specialty of my house only using beef stew or chili…
Wow this thread is a trip down my childhood culinary lane.
fried baloney/salami/hot dogs and eggs – check
using oatmeal to stretch meatloaf or hamburgers – check
noodles, cream of something soup, canned veggies, and bit of meat – check
garden full of stuff grown by Dad and canned by Mom – check
A few I haven’t seen – using mashed potatoes to stretch chili. Most of my family would just ladle the chili over the mashed potatoes, but I liked to mix it together. It made the chili nice and creamy. Mom would also pour pudding over leftover angelfood cake. Made it seem less stale. Variety meats – my uncle still had the family farm back then, so when he would butcher, we’d get the heart, tounge, tail… all the bits noone else wanted. We ate a lot of soup and sandwiches made of odds and ends of cow (they really were cows, they were milked until they got too old and then butchered) and aforementioned home canned veggies.
Chili mac, with chopped onions and grated cheese—to die for! Gotta butter the macaroni first though.
Tuna hot dish, with egg noodles, cream of mushroom and celery soups, and pimentos. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Chicken a la King over buttered toast; Boston baked beans over buttered toast. Yeah!
Hot dish with ground beef, onion, rice, and cream of mushroom and celery soups. Also delicious.
Ground beef with onions and mushrooms in brown gravy, all ladled over a mound of hot buttered mashed potatoes—yum-o! Even better with hot buttered green beans, straight out of the can. (I know fresh or frozen green beans are better nutritionally, but the overall effect just isn’t the same.)
Lots of buttered white bread to sop up the gravy (or, even better, freshly baked buttermilk biscuits made with Bisquick).
The only time my mother used cream of mushroom soup was to make tuna-noodle casserole, and she didn’t do that often because we kids were sure we’d die if we accidentally ate one of the mushroom specks. (It was years before I discovered the yumminess of fresh 'shrooms.) Anyway, that seems to be the only stretch Mom never used. And to this day, I refuse to use cream-of-anything soup. I’ll make my own white sauce, thank-you-very-much!
One of my favorite white sauce recipes is to cook a bag of frozen cauliflower in chicken bouillon with minced onion till it’s mushy, then process it in the blender with milk till it’s the consistency I want. Very yummy in the aforementioned tuna-noodle casserole, and definitely healthier and less salty than cream-of-anything soup.
One of my inventions from the early days of my marriage was to take a packet of seasoned yellow rice and cook it up with a bag of mixed veggies and whatever leftover mean bits we had - generally chicken or pork. When I found a good sale, I’d use fake crab in place of the leftover meat, but it turns out I like it more than the rest of the family, so I haven’t made it in ages, alas.
I can make a pretty good cream sauce, too. But canned cream soups have their place in my pantry.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…cream of celery soup is better than cream of mushroom soup in tuna casserole or tuna pot pie.
I like cream of onion, too…but it’s really salty. And I LIKE salt. So be careful when experimenting with it.
We had pancakes for dinner (never breakfast, oddly enough) and we’d stack our pancakes with a slice of Velveeta (now I use American cheese) between each pancake and top them with Karo Dark Syrup (now I use maple). SO GOOD – especially if you time it where the pancakes are really hot so they melt the cheese.
One of my favorite sandwiches that I still eat: Peanut Butter, Cheese (Velveeta or American), and Lettuce. YUM!
No, closed-face. Just like any other sandwiches. They were so good!
Dessert:
Take a big marshmallow, roll it in melted butter, then roll it in cinnamon; wrap it in a triangle of crescent roll dough from a tube, then roll that in the butter and the cinnamon. Make a bunch of these – mom always enlisted the kids in these projects, for their entertainment value. Bake in a foil-lined muffin tin (messy). She recently told me these were called “ghost rolls”.
Sour Cream and Sugar sandwiches.
White bread with a thin layer of butter, then a thin layer of sour cream, then sprinked with sugar. Eaten open-faced. Yum! We picked that one up from our German step-grandfather.
My mother would take leftover spaghetti sauce and mix it in with elbow macaroni noodles. If there were leftovers of that meal, we would eat it on sandwiches. Talk about carb overload!
We would also make cold tuna salad and use pineapple instead of peas in it. I still make it myself sometimes. I’ve never seen or heard of anyone else doing this.
My brother and his wife were dirt poor for many years. I used to stay with them in the summer (my mother would give them some money for food) and my sister-in-law would boil up macaroni and toss it with butter (or margarine, more likely) and salt. My mother was aghast and refused to make it when I was home. I loved it, and still make a big bowl once in a while.
Then there were the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches that my brother got me hooked on. I know very few people who don’t gag at the thought, and most of them are family members.
Carnut****, thank you for a happy memory! My mom died when I was 11 years old and I don’t have a lot of memories of her. Occasionally something will spark some obscure one, you know how how that is. Anyway, when I read your post it reminded me of her actually making something similar, but with both peas and pineapple. It must have been yummy cause its a happy though vague memory…so thanks!
Creamed Dried Beef on Toast! A basic cream sauce, shredded Dried Beef, over plain white toast, amazing comfort food. Mom also did a Creamed Tuna on toast that, in hindsight, was the exact same dish w/ different protein.
I just realized, after reading this thread, that the reason my mom used to make tuna casserole without noodles is that probably, that’s how HER mom made it during the Depression. It’s still my favorite:
Layer of crushed potato chips
Layer of tuna
Layer of slightly thinned cream of mushroom soup
Layer of chips
Layer of tuna
Rest of soup
Potato chips on top
Yum, yum, yum!
Chili Pizza.
Using leftover homemade chili and making a fresh homemade pizza dough.
No need for the pizza sauce, although I made chili very, very thick, add cheddar, mozzarella, or any mix of cheese you like.
My own special recipe I started making when I was @ 14 yo.
One of our favorite family dinners growing up was pancit. (For the unfamiliar, pancit is a Filipino stir-fried noodle dish.) This was unusual because a) we are not Filipino and b) we made it with kielbasa instead of the traditional chicken, pork, or shrimp. Our family tended to adopt a lot of Asian foods from our friends and neighbors in our heavily Asian town. Why kielbasa? Well, I’d like to say something about Eastern-European heritage blah blah, but I think my mother just found kielbasa easier to cook.
Here is my own food oddity invention (you can all thank me later): Squash bread. Make some garlic bread - I prefer made with sourdough and toasted until crispy. Now cook some spaghetti squash and combine with red sauce of your choice. Spoon squash and sauce mixture over crispy garlic bread. Eat and enjoy!
I just remembered a dessert I invented as a little kid – peanut butter, honey and miniature marshmallows in an ice cream cone. I must have come up with it on an occasion where we had cones but no ice cream.
This wasn’t a family dish, but a girl scouts dish: Chicken on haystacks. A can of chicken, a can of cream o’ chicken soup, a little milk, heat up. The resulting stringy chicken slurry was served over chow mein noodles. This was easy to make over a campfire, I guess.
I hadn’t had it in 30 years, so I tried some a few years back. My son LOVED it. Not for anyone with high blood pressure.