There are a lot of different foods associated with the American Midwest, but the one thing I knew I wanted to make for the challenge was hotdish. I don't remember where or when I first heard about hotdish, but I mostly associate it with Minnesota for whatever reason. (Wikipedia says Upper Midwest, particularly Minnesota and North Dakota, but I always think Minnesota.) For those unfamiliar, hotdish basically consists of some (usually ground) meat, mixed vegetables, and starch (often tots) mixed with canned (usually cream of something) soup in a casserole. Simple and hearty.
For ours, I used a pound of ground turkey, a few cups of frozen mixed vegetables, an onion, cream of mushroom with garlic soup, and about a pound of tots. (The ingredients photo has cheese in it, but didn't end up using the cheese because I didn't think it needed it.)
To make the casserole, in a baking pan you assemble layers of cooked ground turkey, mixed vegetables and onions, soup, and then finally tots on top, and then bake it for about an hour until the tots are golden brown. Very easy to make.
Growing up, my mom would often make a dish called a "hot plate" with ground meat, mixed vegetables, and some sauce (often an Asian sauce, like Yoshida sauce) over rice. That one was stir-fried and not creamy, but this reminded me a lot of that. Just a simple protein, vegetable, and starch dinner. Easy to make, no fuss, but tasty.
We've never had hotdish in the Midwest before, so no idea whether or not this came close to how it should really taste. It wasn't as flavorful as we thought it would be, but that could be because I misremembered some of the recipes I saw online during my research and only got one can of soup instead of two. That probably would have added more flavor. It was a good hearty dinner though.
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