Bobotee

[purplecat]

From my mother's cookbook. Handwritten, but not in her handwriting. Since I was a little dubious about the whole thing, I looked Bobotee up on the Internet. Apparently it is a South African dish (or at least something called Bobotie is) so I'm guessing it comes from a university friend of Mum's who emigrated to South Africa to get married just after she graduated.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Changes, Mistakes and Substitutions
As usual I used bottled lemon juice rather than the real thing. There was some debate about what the unknown recipe writer might have considered curry powder. In the end we mixed some garam masala and chilli powder and went with that. There was further debate around whether the intention was that it should be covered while cooking and a general feeling that over an hour was a long time to cook something like this. In the end we cooked it for about 20 minutes uncovered before pouring in the rest of the liquid and then a further 10 minutes (also uncovered) after that. It was a little dry, but not a disaster. The internet suggests the final effect should be a layer of mince, with a baked egg layer on top which was not what we ended up with. I think maybe I would need to pack the down mince a bit more in the dish.

If I made it again I would probably cover and cook for around 40 minutes and then pour on the remaining liquid and cook for a further 10-15 minutes uncovered until the top was a nice colour.

Verdict
An interesting dish, but it also felt a bit flat somehow. It's gone on a list of "we'll make this one more time and then decide".

Snow-Capped Casseroles

[melannen]

This is part of my project of cooking something from one of my pre-1969 cookbooks every week to go with our Star Trek rewatch. It is from Carnation's Easy-Does-It Cookbook from 1958, which I pulled off the shelf because I had two cans of evaporated milk we'd bought in a fit of preparedness that are about to expire.

Except the Carnation cookbook does not appear to have any evaporated or condensed milk recipes in it??

Either what they're calling "Carnation homogenized milk" means "evaporated milk" - which doesn't really make sense with the recipes - or it was part of a marketing push when they put out a bunch of other product lines and were trying to redefine Carnation as more than just canned milk products.

So anyway this is basically a shepherd-pie sort of thing, except that there is inexplicably cottage cheese in the mashed potatoes. We could not figure out why there was cottage cheese in the mashed potatoes. You could not taste it. You could see weird small white cubes in the mashed potatoes, but I could not see how this added to the dish, or made it more 'snowcapped' either?

Anyway I have cottage cheese left over so we're doing another 'why is there cottage cheese in this' recipe from this book tomorrow too.

2 cups/1 can green beans (drained)
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 1/2 lbs ground beef
2 slices bread
1/4 tsp pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups condensed tomato soup
2 cups mashed potatoes
1 cup Carnation Cottage Cheese
1/2 tsp garlic salt

Place green beans and onion in bottom of 8 individual casseroles. Brown beef in frying pan. Cut bread into cubes.
Mix beef, bread, salt, pepper, and soup. Spoon over green beans.
Combine potatoes, cottage cheese, egg, and garlic salt. Spoon over meat mixture.
Bake casseroles in moderate oven (350 deg F) for 30 minutes. Garnish with parsley.

Changes: I didn't have 8 individual casseroles, so I put it all together in one old Corningware casserole dish. It might actually look more like snow-capped mountains if you put them in individual casseroles and were artistic with the mashed potatoes. Also I didn't have garlic salt so I put in salt and powdered garlic instead. And, being a terrible American, I still don't have a kitchen scale, so I estimated the hamburger. And I used frozen parsley and put it on before the cooking was finished.

Like a lot of these old recipes I've tried, I like that it's easy and mostly uses stuff I keep in the pantry, and it's clearly designed not for someone who wants to Cook, just someone who got home from work and needs to get a filling meal on the table and doesn't have any energy or a microwave.

Also like a lot of these recipes, it was fine? It was filling and comfort-food-y and not terrible? But hard to justify why it was worth making this instead of just heating up some beans and potatoes and meat and putting ketchup on the side.