When I stayed a winter in Argyle, Minnesota with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, everywhere we went they were serving "hot dish and bars."Everyone knows bull's testicles are Rocky Mountain Oysters.
A favorite meal of mine when I was a kid was when my mom had saved up enough of the chicken innards to make enough for a family meal. The necks, livers, gizzards, hearts, and sometimes wings would be stewed, then a bag of egg noodles and of frozen vegetables would go in for a gooey (and to me, delicious) meal that us kids (I think I was the only one who truly loved it!) called "Gizzards and Lizards."
After living off and on for ten years in Hawaii, it took me awhile to refrain from inviting people over for "heavy pupus" (appetizers filling enough to pass for dinner).
"American Chow Mein" (or was that "chop suey'?) was elbow macaroni with spaghetti sauce made with ground beef, topped with American cheese slices.
Anyone from the upper Midwest knows it is "hot dish". Call it casserole, and you're a snob.
Hey, that one is pure Canadian We have a cereal here called "Oatmeal Crisp" and the commercials have this guy keeping the cereal away from his family in many ways - one was telling his father that it was GOATmeal Crisp, made out of goats, "you wouldn't want to eat that". From then one, anything oatmeal is goatmeal!Goatmeal...
I have never heard the term hotdish around here. Casserole is used frequently!
My mom and I refer to mac and cheese as black a bologna.. that stems from me being little and unable to pronounce my words correctly.
Love it!When I was a kid my dad would come home from work with a huge hunk of a hard white cheese. He called it "shah-go" cheese. We all loved it but could never find it in our rural stores so he kept getting it from a friend at work. It wasn't until asiago cheese became popular that I realized it was probably our shahgo cheese.
Love it!