#hot dish

I changed it up slightly (I just added more brats and more celery, since we have six people to feed here, and we only had Coors Light beer to use... sacrilege, I know!)

Do you like comfort food? Are you craving something hot and soft and flavorful? Are you in a Tim Walz-inspired Hot Dish Era? HAVE I GOT THE HOT DISH FOR YOU. Yes, it's out of "Taste of Home." Yes it's probably made up by someone named Sharon from Stevens Point, Wisconsin or some place like that.

It's really called something like "sausage rice bake" or whatever but a buddy of mine dubbed it Casserole LeMewl (I do not know what this means) for some reason and it stuck. It's easy to assemble and packed full of chickeny, sausagey goodness. I make it like once a year.

Ingredients:

2 lbs bulk pork sausage (like the Bob Evans kind, or store brand)

4.5 cups water

2 packets Mrs. Grass instant chicken noodle soup mix or similar (the kind that comes in a box or an envelope)

1 large green bell pepper, diced

1 white onion, diced

4-6 ribs celery (I like a lot of celery so I just use however much I have), diced

1 cup rice (long grain white is fine)

1 can cream of chicken soup (did you think we were gonna get through this recipe without a can of cream soup? think again.)

Preheat to 350. Prep a 9x13 glass dish (I just spray it with a bit of Pam to prevent sticking)

Cook the sausage in a pot with the diced onions/peppers/celery.

Meanwhile, heat the 4.5 cups water in a saucepan and add both packets of soup. Heat to boiling then turn it down.

You will NOT need to salt this. There's plenty salt in the soups and the sausage. Normally I'd salt and pepper onions when cooking them and you can but it's not necessary.

Drain the sausage/veg mixture well. Spread it in the baking dish.

Add the cream of chicken to the noodle soup (check if the noodles are soft - they don't take long). Combine till smooth. Add in the rice.

Now pour this whole mess over the sausage in the dish. Yes, the rice will still be uncooked. It's gonna cook during baking. It will be watery. Mix it around to get the rice evenly distributed and the noodles mixed into the sausage.

cover and bake for an hour. I uncover it about 20 minutes to the end to get some browning on the top. You can cover it with breadcrumbs or whatever but I never do.

I was recently watching Trump speak (not something I typically do 🤢), and the most interesting thing he said had nothing to do with anything he was actually talking about: It was that he used the term Middle West to refer to that generally north-central part of the United States, centered on the Mississippi River, that is neither the South nor the Northeast (nor the Mid-Atlantic, but that's really just a subcategory of the Northeast that Northeasterns use to not get lumped in with each other).

We all know it today as the Midwest. But in times past it was much more commonly known as the Middle West.

(Tangent: It is also one of many geographical region-name reminders of our national East Coast beginnings, as America has like six different kinds of "West": the Midwest, the Southwest, the (Pacific) Northwest, the Mountain West / Interior West, the West Coast / Pacific West—and that's not counting the deprecated terms (such as "Far West," i.e. distinguished from the Midwest) or the old Northwest (which would've referred to places like Ohio and (what we know as) West Virginia)!)

Over the course of the 20th century, "Midwest" became an increasingly common form of the term, eventually overtaking "Middle West" in popularity and, by our lifetimes, completely replacing it. The only people who still use "Middle West" today are very old. I'm only aware of the term's existence because I'm a fan of midcentury media and if you go watch (for example) old Dragnet episodes from the 1950s you'll hear the term used.

I was looking at the Google Ngram Viewer to get a sense of the relative usage frequencies of these terms, and I noticed something interesting: Not only has "Middle West" been driven almost extinct from active usage, but "Midwest" itself has also declined precipitously in the 21st century. People today are not calling the Midwest the "Midwest," at least not with the frequency and relevancy they once did. I was curious if this was another permutation of the usage, so I also looked up "Midwestern" (which I included in the link above), thinking that maybe people nowadays are calling it the clunkier "the Midwestern states" / "the Midwestern US," but the adjectival has declined in step with "Midwest." It really does seem to be that people are just using this geographical category less often.

Perhaps unsurprisingly: the sociopolitical cohesiveness of the Midwest has significantly diminished over time. I think most Midwesterners would still recognize and affiliate with the term if you applied it of them to their faces, but increasingly I think many of them do not think of it in their daily lives as a personal or cultural identifier. Which has many fascinating implications that I'm not going to get into.

(Another Tangent: I feel like I've talked about specifically this "Middle West / Midwest" thing on Tumblr before, but I feel that way about half of everything because after all I've been writing down my thoughts for over 20 years and I've been having thoughts for considerably longer than that, and it's often not clear to me what I've talked about publicly and where.)

@tatertotpotdish @tatertotpotdish2electricboogaloo

In honor of your username, I made a hot dish tonight! I modified your recipe, though, because I wanted to include a protein (ground beef) and fresh green beans. But in either case, it was delicious!