blog — molly yeh

midwest

Turkey Wild Rice Hotdish

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I am so far down the road of sufganiyot testing and hallmark movie watching that I have to remind myself that thanksgiving still hasn’t happened or else I’ll get confused about the turkey cupcakes on my Instagram feed. Still I have no regrets about having moved forcefully in the direction of holiday cheer from the moment that Halloween ended. I mean, let’s hear a round of applause for this bagel macaroni noodle menorah and this narwhal address stamp and the new Sia Christmas album. zooomg. 

We are going to Chicago for the long weekend, where we’ll celebrate Eggboy’s birthday, Stoopie’s birthday, Thanksgiving obviously, and the National Dog Show hosted by Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir. Oh, and my high school reunion, to which I will be wearing the closest thing to adult footie pajamas that Eileen Fisher gift cards can buy. 

I am extremely ready for my Thanksgiving routine, which goes like this:

Wake up to Stoop placing her small dog, Audrey, on my head (Eggboy has been up for hours, chatting with mum and reading the newspaper),

Flop down stairs, pour a coffee, migrate to the couch, struggle for five minutes with mum’s remote controls, and then finally find the Macy’s parade. Sing and dance along when the Camp Broadway kids come on.

Exchange sup dudes with Stoop husband. Alternate between the parade, twitter, pickin my nose, and Audrey being placed on my head until it’s time to oversee Eggboy’s annual pumpkin pie production. (He plans to repeat last year’s success, which consisted of Sarah’s filling and Yossy’s crust.)

Assist with stuffing tasting, vegetable chopping, etc. 

Gush over the sheep dogs during the dog show.

Check Instagram. Crimp Eggboy’s pie, tweet about his progress. Decide if he is a pieboy or not a pieboy this year. 

Ad lib until it’s time to eat and then just keep my head down until it’s clear that everyone’s forgotten about going around the table to say what we’re thankful for. It’s just so mushy 😭😭😭😭😭

Fall asleep in front of a movie, any movie. Maybe Elf this year??

Here is a perfect way to use up your Thanksgiving leftovers, a turkey wild rice hot dish that is topped with leftover stuffing!! It's soo cozy and good, and it's basically a thanksgiving sandwich that you can eat from a bowl. The thing about this wild rice hotdish though is that it should be made anytime during the winter months, not just when you have leftovers. Around here we pretend like it’s a little more of a grownup hotdish since it has ~local wild rice~ adding bite and nutrition, but it’s just as buttery and creamy and rich as, say, its tater tot counterpart. You can totally sub out the turkey for roasted chicken or ground beef or a vegan meat substitute (as so many of you did with the tater tot hotdish)!! And when it’s not stuffing season—which is sad to think about because stuffing should be eaten at all times of the year, right??—go ahead and top this with the traditional crushed cracker topping. Eggmom uses saltines! I bet ritz would be good too. Or cheez-its. Mmmmm.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!!!!

Turkey Wild Rice Hotdish with Stuffing (AKA Thanksgiving Leftover Hotdish)

makes 6 - 8 servings

ingredients

3/4 c (135g) wild rice, rinsed and drained

2 c (480g) water

Kosher salt

6 tb (84g) unsalted butter

2 carrots, finely chopped

2 stalks celery, finely chopped

1 large onion, finely chopped

3/4 c (95g) all-purpose flour

3 c (715g) whole milk

2 tb vegetable, or chicken soup mix (i prefer the orrington farms brand, but something similar, like a bouillon cube or better than bouillon or a homemade bouillon will work)

Black pepper

1 tsp dried rosemary, chopped

4 c (about 515g) cooked shredded roasted turkey*

4 c leftover stuffing (I like this recipe)*

*Since it's impossible to predict exact leftover amounts, don't fret if you have a little more or a little less stuffing or turkey! These amounts are just a ballpark.

Leftover cranberry sauce, for servinng

clues

Preheat the oven to 375ºF.

In a medium saucepan, combine the wild rice, water, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and cook for 30 minutes, until al dente. Drain the rice and set it aside.

To make the creamed soup, in a large pot, melt 6 tablespoons of butter over medium high heat. Add the carrots, celery, onion, and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring, until soft, about 12-15 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for another minute. Stir in half of the milk and cook, stirring, until thickened. Stir in the remaining milk and cook, stirring, until very thick. Add the soup mix, a bunch of turns of black pepper, rosemary, and salt to taste. Taste and adjust seasoning as desired.

In a 9 x 13 casserole dish, 1/3 soup on the bottom, then 1/2 the rice, and 1/2 the turkey. Repeat and then top with the remaining 1/3 of the soup mixture. Top with stuffing and bake for 45 minutes, until bubbly. If the stuffing is getting too browned on top, cover with foil.

Serve with leftover cranberry sauce. 

classic cookie salad

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I’ve been watching so many '60s period dramas that dressing up to make cookie salad felt like a fun thing to do. And it totally was! I figured since we had so much fun with classic tater tot hotdish, it was also time to make another classically upper Midwestern delicacy, the cookie salad. Cookie salad blows the other upper Midwest sweet salads, like candy bar salad, out of the water. Easily. It’s not like hotdish, where wild rice and tater tot would definitely make for an edge-of-your-seat 7-game neck-and-neck series. It’s truly more like a UND hockey team versus every team in their conference situation, where they are just in an entirely different league and there are fireworks at every game. 

A typical cookie salad consists of the following things:

Fudge stripe cookies 

Canned Mandarin oranges or sliced bananas

Vanilla instant pudding mix stirred into buttermilk

frozen whip

They all get mixed together into a fluffy puddingy dessert and then topped with crushed cookies or cookies broken in half and stuck on top to look like little tombstones. This is an important distinction. Your family either crushes or breaks and there’s not a whole lot of overlap except for now because Eggmom crushes and look, I break. I just like the aesthetic, ok? Eggmom taught me both though. She also taught me that mini marshmallows and jelly beans are acceptable mix-ins (I love the textural sensation that marshmallows add).

And,

Ok,

Here is where things get a little…different: Eggmom serves this with the main course. And so does everyone else!!!!! I thought I was hearing things when she said she serves it with the ham (!!!!) but as I dug further and further it slowly became clear that this. is. actually. served. with. the. salads. and. not. the. desserts. 

This is a next level sweet/savory relationship, right???? 

If ham and cookie salad can work as a marriage then surely we aren’t all doomed.

I present to you, my audition picture for women laughing alone with salad:

On my journey to a homemade cookie salad, I did the following:

Made homemade fudge stripes! I went with a simple buttery shortbread that’s sweet and crispy and has a hint of almond. And rather than dealing with the mess of getting chocolate on the bottom, like regular fudge stripes, I gave them thicker-than-usual stripes on top. 

In place of the pudding + buttermilk combo, I experimented a bit with making homemade buttermilk pudding but found the buttermilk to be just too sour for my tastes. I don’t remember it being this sour when Eggmom made me hers. I wonder if something in the instant pudding packets offsets the sourness of buttermilk. Instead I went with a rich vanilla pastry cream.

And instead of frozen whip I obviously went with a good old fresh whip because duh. I’ve always been a sucker for fresh whip, it is the heavy cream at its best. I’m using Land O Lakes® Heavy Whipping Cream here which has a deliciously pure flavor. 

I stuck with the canned mandarins for this but you could definitely go with fresh mandarins as well. 

Lastly, here is a pro-tip: make this the day before so the cookies soak in the pudding and take on a cake-like texture. It is so satisfying. I love it forever. And of course the fact that this can be prepped a day (or even two days!) ahead of time makes this a perfect Thanksgiving dessert. I mean salad! Omg. 

Classic Cookie Salad

Serves 8

ingredients

For the pudding

3 tb (24g) all-purpose flour

6 tb (75g) sugar

1/4 tsp kosher salt

3 egg yolks

1 1/2 c (360g) Land O Lakes® Heavy Whipping Cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp almond extract

 

For the cookies

1 c (130g) all-purpose flour, more for dusting

1/2 c (60g) powdered sugar

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp vanilla extract 

1/2 tsp almond extract 

1/2 c (113g) Land O Lakes® European Style Unsalted Butter, cold and cubed

5 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips

 

For assembly

1 1/2 c (360g) Land O Lakes® Heavy Whipping Cream

1/4 c (30g) powdered sugar

2 (11 oz) cans mandarin orange slices

Sprinkles, optional

Clues

To make the pudding, combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the egg yolks and then the heavy cream. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly until it’s thickened and coats the back of a spoon. Add the vanilla and almond extracts, pour into a heat safe bowl, and cover with plastic wrap so that it touches the surface of the pudding. Refrigerate until cooled, about 1 hour or overnight. 

To make the cookies, combine the flour, powdered sugar, and salt in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. With the mixer running on low, add the vanilla and almond extracts and then gradually add the butter. Mix until the mixture comes together into a dough, slowly increasing the speed once you’re confident that doing so won’t result in flour flying everywhere. Divide the dough in half, press into discs, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight. (If you’re impatient, fine, skip this step.)

Preheat the oven to 350ºF, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set them aside. On a floured surface, roll out the dough to 1/8”-1/4” thick. Cut out 2” circles with a biscuit cutter and then use a big piping tip to cut out 1/2” holes from the center. (Re-roll scraps as needed.) Place them on the baking sheets an inch apart and then bake until they’re jusssst starting to brown around the edges, start checking for doneness at 12 minutes. Let cool on the pans. Meanwhile, melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in a microwave in 30 second increments, stirring after each. Let it cool slightly and then pour it into a piping bag. Snip off the tip and then pipe on 4 thick chocolate stripes. Let the chocolate harden at room temp or in the fridge.

To assemble, first make the whipped cream. In a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the cream and powdered sugar to stiff peaks. In a large bowl, fold together the whipped cream and pudding. Crush the cookies by hand or in a ziplock bag with a rolling pin or other blunt object (reserving 6-8 for the topping) and fold them in. Drain the mandarin slices and fold those in (reserve some of these for the topping too). Top with remaining cookies, mandarin slices, and sprinkles. Refrigerate until you’re ready to serve. 

-yeh!

thanks to land o’lakes for sponsoring this post!

photos by chantell and brett quernemoen

classic tater tot hotdish

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These last couple of post-harvest, post-travel weeks have been but a dream, filled with hockey games and cat belly rubs and house concerts and Sunday meatballs. Eggboy has been power washing all of the tractors and combines so that they can get tucked in for their winter slumber and I’ve been finishing up my yogurt book and studying Hebrew! So far I think I know about half of the alphabet, or at least enough to know that it’s going to be a very long time before I can read the Instagram captions of my Israeli food blog friends. Because the vowels! Where did all of the vowels go??? From my limited understanding, modern written Hebrew doesn’t have vowels, so, like, “pizza” would be “pzz.” I appreciate the minimalist nature of this but I am also anxious to be able to read Al Hashulchan and this one Janna Gur book that I have that’s only in Hebrew, and I see a long road ahead of me. Regardless, I’m having a bunch of fun learning it and the classes are giving me more ways to get rid of the 12,000 scones and things that I’m having to test for yogurt book.

Now that yogurt book deadline is very near, I’ve begun thinking about all of the projects that I’d like to do after it’s turned in. Like make potstickers and kubbeh and maybe start a soup and bread club, and maybe do Facebook lives??? Do we like those? Do you watch those? Oh and (!) did I tell you this, we are in the beginning stages of planning to build a house or remodel our current one. We don’t know what the heck we’re doing so if you have links to posts that are basically like house building for idiots plz send. 

It occurred to me recently that I’ve never posted a classic hotdish. I just went straight to Chinese hotdishes and miniature hotdishes, but there’s a reason that the classic is a classic and that’s because it’s delicious and comforting, and for the lucky people who grew up with it here in the upper Midwest, as nostalgic as can be. 

To review, a hotdish is: a meat, a vegetable, creamed soup, and a starch. Hotdishes make up a subset of casseroles that are a very hearty meal in a pan. They're like creamy meat pies that are everything you could ever want when it's cold, and they're also great make-ahead meals. The battle for most classic hotdish usually comes down to wild rice versus tater tot, and because I have a kick butt recipe for wild rice hotdish that I’ll be posting a little bit later, in time for you to make it with all of your Thanksgiving turkey leftovers, we’re starting here with tater tot. 

The flavors are not fancy, they are meat, potatoes, and very basic soup seasoning. But they are cozy and lovable, like your oldest fleece pullovers. This is what you need for your winter hibernation. The fanciest we’re getting here is in making our own homemade creamed soup, because mum would text me some very sassy bitmojis if ever she caught wind of me buying canned creamed soup. But it’s easy, just make a roux! The hardest part is arranging the tater tots in perfect rows and columns that would have made egggrandma proud. Wait no the hardest part is waiting for it to cool so you don’t burn your mouth (but we have ketchup to help with that)!

It’s supposed to snow on Thursday, so I suggest you pickup some tots. 

classic tater tot hotdish

serves 8

ingredients

1/2 c (113g) unsalted butter, divided

2 carrots, finely chopped 

2 stalks of celery, finely chopped

1 large onion, divided and finely chopped

Kosher salt

3/4 cup (95g) all-purpose flour

3 c (715g) whole milk 

2 tb chicken, vegetable, or beef soup mix (i prefer the orrington farms brand, but something similar, like a bouillon cube or better than bouillon or a homemade bouillon will work)

Black pepper

2 1/4 pounds ground beef (I typically go for around 85% lean)

9 oz frozen peas or corn

1 1/2 pound tater tots

 

If you’re feeling wild: a few handfuls of shredded cheese, for topping

If you’re feeling fancy: fresh chopped parsley, for topping

If you’re feeling like you and I should be bffs: ketchup, for serving

clues

Preheat the oven to 400ºf. First, make the creamed soup: in a large pot, melt 6 tablespoons of butter over medium high heat. Add the carrots, celery, half of the onion, and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring, until soft, about 12-15 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for another minute. Stir in half of the milk and cook, stirring, until thickened. Stir in the remaining milk and cook, stirring, until very thick. Add the soup mix, a bunch of turns of black pepper, and a teaspoon of salt. Taste and adjust seasoning as desired. Pour into a heat safe bowl and set aside. Wipe out your pot and set it back over medium high heat. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and add the remaining half of the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 5-7 minutes. Add the ground beef and cook, breaking up with a wooden spoon, until browned. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the peas or corn. Using a slotted spoon to drain the juices, transfer half of the beef mixture to a 4-quart casserole dish and spread it out evenly. Layer on half of the soup mixture, and then the other half of the beef, and the other half of the soup. Cover with perfect rows and columns of tater tots. Sprinkle with another pinch of salt and pepper, top with cheese, if desired, and bake until the tots are golden brown and crispy on top, about 45 minutes. Let cool slightly, top with parsley if desired, and serve with ketchup.

To make ahead: complete the steps up through topping with tater tots (and cheese, if using). Let cool, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate or freeze until ready to cook. It'll last 2 days in the refrigerator and 3 months in the freezer. If reheating from the fridge, proceed as directed but add on a few more minutes in the oven to ensure that it’s heated through. To reheat from frozen, cover with foil and bake at 350º for an hour, and then uncover and then increase the heat to 400º and bake for another 20-30 minutes, until tots are golden brown and the innards are heated through. 

-yeh!

p.s. vegetarian friends!! i have the tastiest hotdish cooking up for you (it is also vegan). it's quite different from this one but if you're looking for a straight up vegetarian version of this classic tater tot hotdish, jenny has cooked up one idea and it's north dakotan husband approved!

pictured: casserole dish, ketchup dish