So my dad gave us a wonderful cookbook for our wedding. It’s called Feeding the Flock : First Baptist Church, Cokato, Minnesota, 1871-2007. Please, if you are a Library of Congress person, forgive my title punctuation.
It’s full of many wonderful recipes and cuisine examples from around the globe. All made by and for some of the jolliest Minnesotans you’ll ever find. This is not health food or hifalutin restaurant food you’d find in “the cities.” This is two cans of soup, one grocery store in town that only has lettuce six months out of the year, handed down from great, great, great Aunt Betty Crocker for generations, food.
I’ll be featuring some of them here, as I find them, or as we try to prepare them, laced with my acerbic commentary of course. All spelling/grammar peculiarities are as found. First up:
South Of The Border Wiennie Lotta
3 lbs. ground beef
2 lg. light. red kidney beans [ i can only assume she means cans ]
2 (10 1/2 oz.) tomato soup
1 lg. can tomato paste [ not sure how large ]
1 (29-oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 c. chopped onion
1 c. chopped celery
1 c. green pepper, chopped
Seasonings of your choice [ this demands some clever cookery! ]
1 pkg. flour tortillas [ do they only have the one size at Gary’s Grocery Mart? ]
1 lb. hot dogs
3 c. grated cheddar cheese
Fry ground beef [ I’m assuming, the way you would for tacos? ]. Drain and put into 5-quart pan [ probably not my glass-lid Calphalon 5-qt. chef’s sautee, I’m guessing. Maybe a baking pan? ]. Add beans, tomato soup, tomato paste, diced tomatoes, onion, celery pepper and seasonings. Stir together. Cook 2 hours [ Whoa. Maybe this actually is a stovetop thing, sorta like chilli? ] Using 9x13-inch pan, put layer of chili in pan [ wtf, is this ‘chili’ or ‘lotta’? ], layer of tortillas on top. Layer of chili, half of wieners cut up, 1/3 of the cheese on wieners. Repeat layers until pan is full [ aww crap, I wish I could start over! I didn’t save enough of the chili to do very many layers! ]
Bake at 325F for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Put foil loosely over top while baking.
[ NOTE: this recipe is proof that you should always read a recipe through to the end before starting, because the cook/recipe transcriptionist might throw you a loop at the end or in the middle that changes the course of the whole thing, and if you’re not ready for it, you could end up in a whole ‘lotta’ trouble! ]
