Vegetarian Hotdish (By G)

I was reading on Grubstreet the other day about how the New York Times created fury amongst Minnesotans by suggesting grape salad as a classic thanksgiving recipe from that region. To placate the Minnesotan masses the Times is going to replace the salad recipe instead with a recipe for hotdish.  I had never heard of hotdish so I looked into it. Grape salad sounds disgusting but hotdish seemed like the kind of deliciously wacky combination of unlikely ingredients that I like to make.

I gather the classic hotdish is made with a layer of fried beef and onions, overlaid with a layer of corn and beans, then a layer of cream of mushroom soup, then a top layer of potato gems.  Because I've committed us to a reduced meat diet for a little while I made a vegetarian version (I did find one vegetarian version with wild rice instead of meat but Biggs is not a fan of rice. Turns out it is just cheap rice she doesn't like - the fancy wild stuff is apparently one of her favourite things in the world).  Anyway, in my version the first layer of the hotdish was fried mushrooms mixed with par-cooked pearl couscous (cooked in fake chicken stock with some porcini mushrooms added for meatiness).  The next layer was also a bit different in that I just used a packet mix of peas and corn rather than beans.  Everything else was authentic - cream of mushroom soup and potato gems...

It was pretty good, I can't imagine just how tasty the meat version is.