Cultural Appropriation Kitchen Ep. 1
Thai-ter Tot Hot Dish!
As a white man, I’m constantly trying to create new ways to oppress people. It’s coded in my lack of melanin, the reverse-race realists tell me.
Of course that’s not reality. In the aughts, this was simply called “fusion.” To actually trace back every food to it’s original culture and eat only that, we’d all be eating whatever the first homosapiens were eating 3 million years ago. Have fun with bashing a possum on a rock and eating raw while being surrounded by pack animals.
Tater Tot Hot Dish is a weird Minnesota thing. One, we call casseroles “hot dish,” and two, just like any other place that has unbearable weather for 8 months, we like “comfort food,” although this isn’t quite on the level of British savoury pies. My favorite was one my friend’s Panamanian mother made: Farfale noodles, cream of chicken soup, corn, Corn Flakes (all sounding very Hot Dish to this point) and then super spicy sausage and peppers. Sweet, salty, spicy, comforting.
We also have a large Hmong population, and they opened a ton of Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, and now I’m seeing much more Cambodian, restaurants. So many, in fact, that the level of competition in the marketplace has ensured that one street in Saint Paul probably has the best Vietnamese food in the country. Thai food used to be an expensive night out, but competing with their Vietnamese neighbors’ $10 for a bowl of Pho and a Banh Mi caused the Thai restaurants to lower prices to compete. Ah, the “tyranny of capitalism” is delicious.
I had the benefit of having Hmong friends in grade school who were proud to bring their culture’s food to multicultural festivals, excited and gleeful when kids used to eating shit like hot dish would try it. I also had the benefit of a chef father who traded cooking techniques with a Thai chef, so we occasionally got to have it at his house.
I had actually never had Tater Tot Hot Dish until I got married. It seems to be more of a favorite among Minnesota’s huge Norwegian and Nordic populations, but my mother was from out of state and my father grew up eating food his Italian mother made. My wife, Irish to the bone, wouldn’t have had this food from her parents either, but had it from her daycare lady, a woman who you could see on Fargo serving up hot dish at a potluck.
I thought, “ew,” when she told me how much she loved it, but decided to make it for her because I like seeing her happy. It’s not bad, not amazing either. I tried using better beef, alternatives for condensed soup, baking the thing in a puff pastry, but the dish had it’s limits.
I tried to think of way to spice it up with curry, but which one would go well with ground beef? I thought of which curry would go best, massaman, green, red thai…but what would keep this bound together like condensed soup instead of falling apart like loose slop? Peanut sauce!
But not dipping sauce. This is a sauce I learned to make watching my dad make curry. It’s simple, sticky, delicious, and I make no claims of authenticity. I just couldn’t get ground beef to work in my mind as I practiced making it in my imagination. Ditch the ground beef for ground chicken, skip the “what ifs.”
I’m not good at writing down recipes (I have an app, I have one entry: jerk grilled whole chicken, 2012) because measuring is for bakers.
THAI-TER TOT HOT DISH
1lb ground chicken
1/2 green pepper, diced (sub for Thai chili peppers if you like it hot/dying)
1 yellow onion, diced
Tablespoon of duck fat/vegetable oil
3 tablespoons of red chili paste
2/3 cup peanut butter
1 can of light coconut milk (light is better for reducing)
1/4 cup lime juice
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 bag friggin’ frozen tots there, bud
1 lime cut into lil’ wedges for garnish
A bit of cilantro
Crushed up peanuts to taste
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a skillet, heat to medium/high and add oil. When it starts to lightly smoke, saute the peppers and onion first until they brown lightly, then add the ground chicken. Use a potato masher to separate the chicken as it doesn’t tent to crumble like ground beef. Before it’s completely cooked, add chili paste and coconut milk. When blended, add peanut butter, soy sauce, lime juice, sugar and salt and stir frequently until it begins to thicken. When it looks nice and sticky, stir in half the bag of tater tots. Plop the whole thing in a casserole dish (ahem, hot dish) or cake pan or whatever you bake stuff in and cover with remaining tots. Bake at 400 F for 30 minutes. Garnish with cilantro, crushed peanuts and serve with lime wedges.
The dish was a hit with my wife (who before we started dating had never tried steak). My son (3) ate it, but my daughter the “super taster” went and made a salami sandwich (usually not allowed). It’s not for everyone, but the experiment worked. The hardest part was to figure out if something with such a specific mouth feel as tater tots would go with vibrant spices and sweet-spicy-savoury, and the peanut butter brought it all together.
STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE: AHI TUNA LUTEFISK!
