My Grandmothers Cookbook: Claires Hot Casserole
This is the first recipe Ive chosen to make from my Grandma Gs cookbook. Yesterday I blogged about my plan to cook from my Grandmas handwritten cookbooks and Ive chosen one of the many casseroles or hot dishs to start with.
Here is the recipe. This one illustrates a few things Ive noticed about Grandma Gs cookbooks, the first being that she always lists the name of the person she got the recipe from if she asked for it. I see the same names repeated over and over although I dont know who they are. You can also see she labelled it Good. She did this with a few throughout. Some are Very Good. Finally the canned soup. My god the canned soup! This recipe has FOUR CANS of it!
Here are the assembled ingredients without a can of tomato soup and the 2 pounds of ground beef. I forgot to put those out for some reason.
I was starting to doubt I even had a casserole dish big enough for this.
Two pounds is a lot of beef! I dont eat a lot of meat and I almost never cook it for myself so this is a lot of meat!
Here is the process happening pasta boiling meat browning veggies being chopped into the casserole dish.
Okay veggies are chopped and its time to add the scariest ingredient the one I really didnt want to use. But heck its in the recipe and the recipe is Good.
Oh god canned mushrooms are disgusting.
Okay speaking of disgusting. Please note my artistic way of highlighting the four canned soups this recipe called for.
Its about this point when I decided I needed to add my own ingredient to the process.
Oh and yes my dish isnt big enough. The pasta isnt even in there yet. According to Grandma G I should also add salt and pepper I added pepper but I could not in good conscience add more salt to a recipe with four cans of soup! Sorry Grandma.
So I now have two of these casseroles. I hope I like it. Grandma G gave the option to either use buttered crumbs or crumbs and cheese so I thought I would at least sneak some freshly grated parmesan into the recipe.
And now we just pop it in the oven for. What?!? An hour? But everything is cooked! Oh okay.
While we wait let me tell you the first thing I know about my Grandma. I dont know much about her but I know how she met my Grandfather. My Grandfather was working, I believe, for a mining company and one night he was invited home to his supervisors home for dinner. Now, I dont actually know how old they were when this happened but I imagine my Grandfather being 34. At dinner he met his supervisors daughter my Grandmother who would have been 20 at the time.
Thats the story I know of how they met. As I said Im unsure of the ages but I know he was 14 years older than her. I guess liking older men runs in the family!
*ding*
Dinners ready!
So here it is final dish. I have to say its pretty much how you would imagine it would taste. Once in my life I have had hamburger helper and this kind of reminded me of that. I dont know how good I think it is but Im sure its very Good when you are trying to feed a husband and three hungry boys on little money.
Tomorrow: The strangest pie you have ever seen!
Music to cook by: I listened to Locksleys Be In Love album
This is the first recipe Ive chosen to make from my Grandma Gs cookbook. Yesterday I blogged about my plan to cook from my Grandmas handwritten cookbooks and Ive chosen one of the many casseroles or hot dishs to start with.
Here is the recipe. This one illustrates a few things Ive noticed about Grandma Gs cookbooks, the first being that she always lists the name of the person she got the recipe from if she asked for it. I see the same names repeated over and over although I dont know who they are. You can also see she labelled it Good. She did this with a few throughout. Some are Very Good. Finally the canned soup. My god the canned soup! This recipe has FOUR CANS of it!
Here are the assembled ingredients without a can of tomato soup and the 2 pounds of ground beef. I forgot to put those out for some reason.
I was starting to doubt I even had a casserole dish big enough for this.
Two pounds is a lot of beef! I dont eat a lot of meat and I almost never cook it for myself so this is a lot of meat!
Here is the process happening pasta boiling meat browning veggies being chopped into the casserole dish.
Okay veggies are chopped and its time to add the scariest ingredient the one I really didnt want to use. But heck its in the recipe and the recipe is Good.
Oh god canned mushrooms are disgusting.
Okay speaking of disgusting. Please note my artistic way of highlighting the four canned soups this recipe called for.
Its about this point when I decided I needed to add my own ingredient to the process.
Oh and yes my dish isnt big enough. The pasta isnt even in there yet. According to Grandma G I should also add salt and pepper I added pepper but I could not in good conscience add more salt to a recipe with four cans of soup! Sorry Grandma.
So I now have two of these casseroles. I hope I like it. Grandma G gave the option to either use buttered crumbs or crumbs and cheese so I thought I would at least sneak some freshly grated parmesan into the recipe.
And now we just pop it in the oven for. What?!? An hour? But everything is cooked! Oh okay.
While we wait let me tell you the first thing I know about my Grandma. I dont know much about her but I know how she met my Grandfather. My Grandfather was working, I believe, for a mining company and one night he was invited home to his supervisors home for dinner. Now, I dont actually know how old they were when this happened but I imagine my Grandfather being 34. At dinner he met his supervisors daughter my Grandmother who would have been 20 at the time.
Thats the story I know of how they met. As I said Im unsure of the ages but I know he was 14 years older than her. I guess liking older men runs in the family!
*ding*
Dinners ready!
So here it is final dish. I have to say its pretty much how you would imagine it would taste. Once in my life I have had hamburger helper and this kind of reminded me of that. I dont know how good I think it is but Im sure its very Good when you are trying to feed a husband and three hungry boys on little money.
Tomorrow: The strangest pie you have ever seen!
Music to cook by: I listened to Locksleys Be In Love album
Heh so you come from old Irish miner stock. I liked hearing about your grandparents.
Maybe you can open a soup kitchen with all that food.
But canned mushrooms does seem cruel.