Casseroles and Pimientos and Gallstones Oh My!

Man Pleaser Casserole Transcript

did you all eat casseroles growing up oh I know we did absolutely my favorite parts were how creamy they were and the ooey gooey cheese and if you were lucky mom would crisp up some crunchy things on the top and they'd get all brown in the oven and they were so yummy so good casseroles really are comfort food at its finest my mouth is watering just talking about them oh mine too it's sad to think that they've gone out of fashion in the past few decades oh not at my house that's true that's why I think it's a good idea for us to make one sure get ready to take a trip back in time to see if this delightful dish will make us feel like we've had a big warm hug from mom

welcome to mom's wooden spoon get your apron on and your fanny flicker ready as we cook up some nostalgia oh yummy

hey everybody this is Kristen and hey this is Carrie well today we are going to be making man pleaser casserole oh I do love a good man pleaser you make me nervous when you say that so this is from Mary's Memo October 21st 1974 um so the man pleaser casserole doesn't have a lot of ingredients it has three pounds of pork stew meat and we'll talk about that in a minute because that is not easy to find it doesn't smell real fantastic either it does not smell good let's see we need eight ounce package of thin uncooked egg noodles cream of chicken soup creamed corn salt and pepper longhorn cheese which we'll also chat about I'm curious about that and we need a green pepper and then a can of pimentos which is not really something that I use in my everyday cooking no but it seems very time appropriate absolutely I can remember mom having a jar of always pimentos or can of pimentos all the time yes right next to her gallstones oh please it was so gross our mom had her gallbladder out when we were little and she was a nurse and she thought it would be super cool for us to be able to see it and so she had the surgeon put her gallstones in a jar and they must have filled it with I don't know like alcohol some liquid and in order to preserve them she put them in the fridge remember that oh I do and I remember staring at them they were so nasty in my mind they look like the meatballs in the Spaghettios and meatballs oh no I remember them being like hairy oh they are so gross oh we are absolutely turning everyone off to this recipe at this moment come to our house cook some food get some pimentos and gall stones yummo and then finally there's uh buttered breadcrumbs which was really interesting because Mary doesn't say how to make the buttered breadcrumbs I think that homemakers in the 1970s just automatically knew how to make those I think that was popular well and I would assume that they probably didn't just go to the grocery store and buy a can no like we do now no they made theirs and I think it was a money-saving way to use up stale bread right yeah oh for sure and so I honestly had to look up how to make buttered breadcrumbs I didn't want to have them turn into mush I didn't know if I needed to toast them in a pan right so actually what you end up doing is you take stale bread okay and you crumble it up in a bowl and then you mix it with melted butter interesting but wouldn't that make it all mushy I don't think so because of the fat content of the butter but I guess we're gonna find out aren't we this little little science experiment woo hoo okay and then I think that's it so right the first thing we had to do and this kind of takes away from the ease of making a casserole was we had to cook pork ahead of time interesting it was supposed to be veal but you could not find it she said specifically that it was all but extinct so this required us to cook the pork pork stew meat okay I could not find pork stew meat I can find beef stew meat all over the place so what I did is I bought a big pork roast and I just cut it up into bite-sized pieces and it said to cook it in the crock pot and so I did cook it in the crock pot but the directions said to cover the meat with just enough water barely enough water and then to cook it until the meat was tender and the broth reduced so did you chop it into bite-size pieces before you put it in the crock-pot I did okay yes it was in there in bites and then it just made an incredible amount of broth we're talking six to eight cups worth of broth wow and so that makes me nervous with all the other ingredients is that going to make everything too soupy so the casserole dishes that we put it in would that much broth even fit I don't think so now we do have the noodles and they're raw you don't cook those first so they're going to absorb some of the liquid but I took off two full cups out of this um actually three don't tell anybody I poured one cup down the drain and I saved two cups of the broth in the fridge in case we feel like we need it later well I think if we go and put it in the casserole dishes and they don't fill the dishes we can just add some extra broth yep and I am looking at this amount of pork it was three pounds exactly I measured it I cut it I had it on the bone the pork roast was on the bone I cut it off the bone I measured the amount I mean this was a lot of work for a simple casserole you know yeah I'm wondering if you could like cook four or five pounds of pork and then use it for dinner that night take the remaining three shove them in the refrigerator for your man to please him next night right but you know what that brings up something that I found when I was looking up casseroles okay I was looking up when did casseroles come to be and kind of what was the history of them oh I do love a casserole I know you do you were telling me that whenever your husband does a lot of the cooking most of the cooking all of the cooking and that whenever he makes a casserole you find it so delicious always and the only reason he makes them is because I like that because he prefers like a meat and a veggie every time wow yeah so he only he specifically seeks out casserole recipes just for me so in my house it would be a Carrie pleaser ooh yes it would so I was reading and it said that casseroles have existed since the beginning of time like since people were cooking yes and as a matter of fact there was an article in good housekeeping from March of 1917 which actually talked about the law and lure of casseroles so I'm not sure which I'm more impressed with the oldness of the casserole or the fact that good housekeeping existed in 1917. I was just surprised by this wow yes and so here's what this article said I'm going to read you the quote okay the primitive woman herself was the inventor of the casserole cooking and in her pottery dishes she boiled and stewed meats vegetables and fruit everything which she did not cook in the ashes or on a hardwood stick over fire wow you know in casseroles actually come from the uh dish that they were cooked in so that's how they got their name oh yeah so they had like pottery casserole dishes I suppose back in primitive times right and it was really the original keeper of the leftovers it really was which then kind of brings us more towards the depression era actually the early Campbell's soup 1900s created the very first condensed soup and when they did that they made this huge marketing campaign of all the different ways that you could use Campbell's condensed soup not just making soup itself right and that was kind of the start of these modern homemakers casseroles making casseroles right soup stove top stuffing chicken yes so good oh delicious add some noodles and then when the depression hit in the 1930s Campbell's just ramped up their campaign for again using Campbell's soup and other things right and so it just became a huge thing in the depression to use Campbell's soup in casseroles I'll be darned and it's lasted all this time it has actually the 1950s were the height of the casserole the 1970s they were starting to wane well obviously not in our house obviously not I think we had casseroles like almost every night all the time but our mom is truly fantastic about using every last bit of food that she possibly could and that really is what casseroles are for yeah and so as I was researching casseroles I found the most misogynistic article you ever want to read written by a man of course about women who make casseroles oh boy they were pretty darn controversial in the 1950s and in an article in the Tuscaloosa news in 1954 this journalist states women like casseroles men don't well that's true in my house that's true yeah that's true but he goes on to say that casseroles were created by women to trick men much like when women put on makeup and acted all coy that it's all a trick to lure men in I mean seriously that's taking casseroles a bit too far don't you think it's amazing I ever got married I don't wear much makeup I'm sucky at coy apparently you're not very good and then he goes on to say and even worse women are more coy when they make coy casseroles

so really we are not making a man pleaser casserole we are making a coy casserole yeah that's what we're gonna have to title it a coy casserole not Koi there is no fish no fish no fish in your garden or harmed in the making of this casserole that is right so let me just read you what this article said and we're going to post this article on our website okay so you guys can read it in its entirety in its horrific entirety I told my husband about it I said I'm hoping it's kind of tongue-in-cheek he goes nah it was the 50s that was not tongue-in-cheek oh no doubt I mean that was absolutely as a woman meet your husband at the door with a drink and your well-cleaned children I mean that was the norm it was the norm and for a man to act like a woman saving money by using leftovers is being coy and deceptive in some way right it's quite offensive well to us, to us all kinds of things that I would find offensive but that's true so here is just a little quote boy I'm into the quotes today I'm really going with this dang okay well here we go I couldn't believe it and so picking out a single quote from this horrible article was tough but this is the one that I love the most casseroles symbolize women's reluctance to face the fact that yesterday's roast beef or chicken or lobster or veal or tuna fish is still yesterday's roast beef etc now defrocked sliced up and hidden like a poor relative under a melange of whipped potatoes noodles or rice wow he feels very strongly about casseroles I'm not sure what melange means but I'm impressed with his use of it I agree I could not believe it and since we are not using leftover pork in this recipe perhaps this author would have been pleased maybe I keep thinking so our mom is famous for I said using every last bit of food yeah she does not do casseroles she's all about the soups oh she is a big soup maker and I have to be honest I'm not a big soup lover I hate soup really we both are I wonder why is it because we had so much soup as kids yes I don't know I will eat cream-based soups like I love cream of potato cream yeah those are delicious you know what and I don't love raw tomatoes very much but a good tomato basil bisque to me is delicious Carrie's making a face not her thing no thank you and I I can do some chicken noodle soup but much beyond that not the best stews not a fan really I guess that may be because that's how we had all our leftovers always oh we could have written an article uh making soups is how a mother takes a melange of ingredients and hides the fact that it was yesterday's pot roast to defraud her children let's do it let's write an article about that we do have a blog ooh yes

okay so let's take the stinky pork meat yes it's so juicy and so we'll figure out if we need to get the rest of the broth out of the fridge sure okay we'll play it by ear yeah okay so until the broth is cooked down and the pork is tender and then you're supposed to this is a lot of work I had to refrigerate it overnight and then I got it out this morning and I scraped all the fat off the top okay so now here it is in our bowl and it says to just to stir in the uncooked noodles the soup the corn the see everything it just goes right in so here we go the corn I'm assuming we're gonna drain oh no it's cream it's cream corn and here's the trouble it said to get one one pound can of cream corn and they don't make that huh that's cool right so we have 14.75 ounces so we could do one and like a splash from this can or we could just say we have plenty of broth let's just add one can of cream corn because what am I gonna do with a three-quarters full can of cream corn let's just do one one can okay so it's a pop top probably unlike the 70s there she goes and that was a great sound let's see here's a spatula to scrape it out and I'm going to add in the noodles we had to get out a bigger bowl because this is the most gigantic amount of pork I've ever seen it well the recipe does say that you can put it into two casserole dishes and then oh I cut the spatula okay nice we're going to be eating plastic bits you can't have nice things around me this is why we can't have nice things Carrie anyway so when you are ready to prepare the casserole you can put it in two dishes cover one and freeze it and save it for later right um so that's the option but they're only one and a half quart sized dishes I mean I'm looking at this going I don't think I don't think we have enough space in those dishes to fit all this food oh well we'll have three casseroles we'll eat like kings or we'll eat like menses please very pleased like pleased mens all right I'm gonna start chopping up the green pepper and I believe it said a half of a green pepper yep one half of a green pepper chopped all right and why whilst while you do that I'm gonna do some mean measuring okay what are you measuring uh salt and pepper and I thought I'd do the pimento one teaspoon of salt and my sister set out wait a quarter teaspoon for me but what is a tablespoon whoopsie daisies so we're going to do it four times

I can't read recipes apparently so there will be no talking as I'm counting if shoot if you uh it's all good if you talk while Carrie measures it's a big problem she'll get going and going and it'll be the saltiest casserole we've ever tasted in our lives six quarter teaspoons into it all right green pepper chopped and going in excellent you are fast I am well it's just a half a one so that was pretty simple okay so then the buttered bread crumbs oh it just it doesn't say how much buttered bread crumbs it just says buttered bread crumbs so I looked up how to make buttered bread crumbs because I had no idea right how many right and so I also looked up I mean I had no idea this must be something that that homemakers in the 70s knew how to do to make butter breadcrumbs and how much would be good for a casserole so I looked up old 1970s casserole recipes and it calls for a cup of bread crumbs for a casserole but then I didn't double that because we have two dishes I just looked up you know how much butter bread comes would somebody use but I think it's just one casserole that you can put into two for prolonged man pleasing so I had to look up this is so pathetic I can't believe I didn't know this how many pieces of bread equals a cup of bread crumbs and everybody's gonna hear the crrrrrk

I think I made the bread too stale it's supposed to be stale bread and I think it's it's supposed to be soft breadcrumbs and I just I set that bread up for too long it really crumbs great it's going to be lovely crumbs and buttery right so it's four slices of bread makes apparently one cup of bread crumbs really yep so I guess we could measure and find out if that's the truth that would be kind of fun we have a one cup measuring cup here and let's put it in and see what we have and so oh no four is gonna be way too many slices of bread I think it's gonna be two but I love love love crunchies on my casserole to me that's one of the best parts that crunchy top uh yes or cheese well of course the cheese that the cheese is too well that cheese is the best part but second to that is something delicious and crunchy on the top um so shall we just do all four pieces of bread well my only fear would be is that gonna soak up too much liquid and then the noodles are going to be okay not even al dente yeah we'll just do one cup okay all right and so we're making it up we're making it up as we go yes and so you have to melt two tablespoons of butter and mix it in with these bread crumbs okay so my question is if we're not gonna do four pieces of bread should we do two tablespoons of butter probably not who knew we could have so many questions so many questions and again I think this is stuff that homemakers just knew how to do oh or we're really crappy at man pleasing I think we are I'm going to cut down the amount of butter okay we have in this dish oh look at me I put it in as individual pats so there we go should we melt the butter and mix the bread crumbs when we're ready to put this in the oven sure so that they don't get soggy does it go on the top yeah it goes on the top oh yeah absolutely and we still have the cheese to grate oh perfect and what I found so interesting is that Mary's Memo just says longhorn cheese right so this is from the milk of a longhorn cow it is not it is not which parlays itself I don't know if that's the right word parlay yeah ooh that's fancy so I just realized that buffalo mozzarella yeah I thought it was named buffalo mozzarella because the balls are big like a buffalo no you didn't true I was watching oh a tv show are we talking like a buffalo's man parts is that what you're saying like a buffalo's man parts that is so inappropriate

this is a family-friendly podcast it was not no okay just a buffalo you know we could have called it giraffe mozzarella okay okay just a large animal large ball buffala

so we're gonna call it buffala from now on so I guess if you got like a small ball of mozzarella it would have been mouse mozzarella that's right I don't know anyway so in my obviously completely incorrect brain I did not realize that it's actually the milk of a buffalo and now I'm sure people milk buffalos I suppose so and it's like you can find it in the regular grocery store buffalo milk mozzarella and it's delicious it really is good but who knew I clearly do not have a future in buffalo milking apparently not I don't think I would want to try that one bit no scary to get yourself down under a big old buffalo

regardless of if it doesn't have big old buffalo balls I mean do you have your friend like feeding the buffalo marshmallows is it like when you're trying to give a dog a bath that a dog that hates having a bath and you slather peanut butter on the wall of the shower so the dog licks and licks so the buffalo will stand still while you milk it do buffalos like peanut butter

I don't know my dog likes marshmallows that's where I went no oh he loves them oh my goodness that is so funny he gets crazy wild so longhorn is the name for the shape of the cheese I found so now I'm not quite sure why it's called longhorn but any cheese that is called longhorn this or that is made in a large cylinder and then when it's packaged for the supermarket it's cut into moon shapes or circle shapes or the way we usually get it is in a half moon shape and so that shape is longhorn well so I'm thinking of any cheese that you see sorry the any cheese that you see ever don't they come in those big like discs right which would be moon shaped I suppose but longhorn is traditionally a colby cheese okay colby is in the cheddar family and delicious it is so good it's kind of a riff on cheddar a milder nuttier way better melting riff on cheddar all right and so colby is an American cheese and so perhaps it has to do with the way that American cheese makers named the shapes of their right cheese forms because I'm thinking of like old school Italian cheese makers right and they're totally different and this is clearly American right yeah all right so you know I was wondering if we should buy shredded cheese for this recipe because it just says longhorn cheese and I do not remember mom buying shredded cheese in the 70s no yes so I did not buy shredded colby good I'm not even sure that you can find it I'm sure you can but it's not very available where we live no and they put cornstarch in it to keep it from becoming a mass of stuck together shreds right that nobody can use and so I think freshly shredded cheese is far superior I think so so that's what I did and here's another thing that shows me that I am not a very good homemaker or at least I don't have the knowledge that a 70s and 80s homemaker would have and that is it said let me see how many cups it said that we had to have it says two cups of shredded cheese and I did not know what size of a cheese block to buy to get to cups well why would you so I had to look that up I had to look that up as well thank goodness for Google yes but you know in all reality now we know why in cookbooks they would have pages of that kind of information yes because nobody would know unless you've done it and there was no Google right so you'd have to go to your cookbook to find out you know and a lot of the older cookbooks have those pages in the front that tells you of different cuts of meat and you know ratios of you know how much an eight ounce block of of colby cheese would make when you shred it right all of that yes and so actually it was an eight-ounce block of colby cheese that shredded into two cups super easy you know what I didn't measure it to test that before I dumped it in the casserole so here we go yeah mix that bad boy up oh my golly and then we're gonna have to put it in the casserole dishes so this recipe came out ten days before my first birthday yes and because I am fortunate enough to have the best birthday anybody could ever have yep you do on Halloween yeah you're a Halloweeny I decided to look up the most popular costume for Halloween 1974 for kids oh my gosh I can't wait to hear what it is and so you'll have to remember the costumes of the 70s were those plastic masks oh yeah with the elastic that went around the back of the head some of them were advertised as masks with hair what yeah which meant if you bought a mask of let's say I love genie genie yes included in the plastic mold of mask was her hair so it wasn't like luscious flowing hair it was a plastic molded ponytail it was just the mask that had hair on the top but it was made of solid plastic as part of the mask yes instead of ending with the forehead it ended with the hair ooh fancy

that was good marketing yeah and then the costumes were like those plastic things it was like wearing a plastic trash bag it was with just a picture of the mask and so you're Frankenstein and you have your yellow Frankenstein mask no hair um on that and then your plastic little get up shirt with a picture of the mask on it and Frankenstein in case maybe the person is like well I do not know who you are I will not give you candy let me interrupt you real quickly in what universe is Frankenstein yellow I don't know

it must have been a cheap pigment because a whole bunch of them were yellow really very interesting but Frankenstein was not the most popular for tiny tots of 1974. it was

drumroll Casper the Friendly Ghost oh my gosh I was Casper of course we have a picture of me in no I think we have a picture of you in Casper and it was my hand me down Casper costume right because you probably were Casper in 1974 and then I got to do it again like four years later when I got to Trick or Treat oh my gosh we need to find that picture and put it on the website you were so cool oh my gosh I was cool before I even knew it mom made you cool oh that is just so not something I thought I would ever hear tell 16 year old you that Mom made you cool oh my gosh that kind of makes me sick a little bit thinking of it okay so I'm going to microwave the butter you get a picture of this soupy hot mess that we have created okie doke okay so Carrie got the perfect picture of our delicious sloppy mess in this bowl and now we are going to put the melted butter on the breadcrumbs let's put it in a bigger bowl to kind of mix it around it has nice colors in it with the red pimento the green pepper I mean orange cheese if I were a man that would please me my man would not be pleased but I am pleased all right I'm gonna drizzle the butter over and then kind of mix it with a fork I think this is too little of a bowl to be doing this in but we're going to give it a try and so far the butter has not made the bread like into one gelatinous clump of bread no not at all this has you know some nice little chunks in it big chunks that will either break our teeth as they cook and get crispier or they'll be crunchy deliciousness yes and you know what the butter seems to be softening up this bread that I left out for way way too long do you have the memo let's take a peek and find out how long we have to cook this so we're gonna bake it in a preheated 350 degree oven for an hour an hour okay I think these casserole dishes are the perfect size they sure look like it do we put the bread crumbs on when we put them in the oven or do you put that on later well let's see what Mary has to say okay um nothing she says absolutely nothing she does not even tell you what to do with the breadcrumbs nothing they're never mentioned again okay so my recommendation from making things like this is I wouldn't put the breadcrumbs on right away I might wait halfway through the cooking process because we don't want them soaking up the liquid they are totally going to I mean they will become an absolute mush yeah yeah all right we'll pop those in the oven and we'll see you guys in an hour yeah okay the casserole is out of the oven and we messed up big time now we do think we remedied our error I don't think Mary meant for us to use the broth from the pork it was a liquidy mess it was I had to use a ladle and scoop liquid out of the casserole after it had been cooking for 45 minutes it was still soupy so I probably scooped out a good two cups of liquid and then we added more noodles and mixed it up then we put it back in and put on the butter breadcrumbs like the last 10 minutes and it looks gorgeous now but note to you all if you're gonna make this man pleaser casserole do not add the broth I think the liquid from the cream corn and from the condensed soup is basically enough yeah and I'm I'm assuming that the meat puts off more liquid as you bake it yeah I think so well let's dig into this okay I'm gonna do the scooper on this one if you don't mind ooh here's a plate this is gonna be great so the buttered bread crumbs look gorgeous on the top I really like buttered breadcrumbs yes you do so here's a fork all right so Carrie you want to take the first bite hopefully the noodles are all done because like I said yeah I I stirred in a whole bunch of extra noodles so and you wouldn't have to do that if you did not put in all that broth if you made it the right way I know right I I suppose I just didn't get it didn't read the recipe correctly but all right you've taken a bite what do you think it tastes to me like tuna noodle casserole but with pork this is not bad at all no it probably could use a little extra salt and pepper but I really like lots of salt and pepper on my food yeah and I think one of the things that you know we're noticing is that these recipes I just don't think by and large are going to have a ton of spices right and I think that's going to be a common refrain is I would have added a little spice like paprika on the top might have been a super nice a little garlic I would probably cut the pork up in even tinier pieces but it's so soft that you can easily just you can just break it up but yeah the bite with noodles and a little bit of pork I think that's great the corn flavor is delicious and while there's not a lot of spices all of the flavors are very mild yeah so you don't get any one super flavor that you're left like oh there was too much of that everything is mild and so I guess in that regard they all kind of mesh well together yep it is comforting it is warm it'd be a great way to use up leftover pot roast don't tell that man from the 1950s am I being coy always always it would be a great way to use up leftovers I think and um while I'm not sure if it's a man pleaser it definitely is a woman pleaser I think it's a Kristen and Carrie pleaser yeah awesome that's it for this episode thanks so much for joining us the recipe pictures of the casserole and that crazy news article from the 1954 Tuscaloosa News will be linked on our website if you like what you heard please share this podcast with a friend and be sure to give us some positive feedback if this isn't the podcast for you just move on don't make me get the wooden spoon

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