Runza Casserole: Put it all in one pan and you're done

Today, we are making runza casserole!

Runza Casserole 2 pounds ground beef 2 onions, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onions) 4 cups finely shredded cabbage Salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste (I added garlic powder and a lot of paprika) 2 tubes refrigerated crescent rolls (or one large batch of biscuit dough) 1 pound mozzerella cheese, shredded (I used cheddar instead) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Brown beef and onion in a large pot. Drain and return the pot. Reduce heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the cabbage on top of the meat. Put the lid on the pot and let it cook without peeking for about eight minutes. Then stir in the salt and seasonings. While the cabbage is steaming, unroll one tube of crescent rolls. Place them in a flat layer in the pan. Press to close seams. Put the meat and cabbage over the rolls. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then unroll the second tube of crescent rolls and lay them on top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with foil for the last 10 minutes (this softens the top crust). Note: If you cut this in half, it fits nicely in an oven-safe skillet. Irene Biederstedt (McLaughlin, South Dakota); KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

I love the picture on the front cover. It looks like a snapshot from the Thanksgiving office potluck. Also, that light looks like a late-1980s spaceship.

KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

As I understand it, runzas are yeast rolls stuffed with meat and cabbage. They look like something that originally was a complete meal in an edible handheld package. Today, we're simplifying the process by putting everything into one big pan.

Speaking of simplifying things (or at least trying to), we are shredding today's cheese the modern way! I already planned to electrically shred the cabbage, so I thought I might try to do the same with the cheese. 

One pound of cheese may seem a lot for one casserole. But if you read the ingredients, we're using a lot of everything. If you make this recipe in full quantity, it will feed a whole family, any friends have wandered in, and anyone looking for leftovers the next day.

I have to admit, I like the electric cabbage shredder more than I thought it would. Fussing with all those food processor attachments seemed pointless the first time-- especially when I had to clean every one of them. But sometimes I just want to make dinner without any knife skills. And even though this adds a lot more dishes to the pileup in the sink, sometimes it's nice to get dinner ready faster. 

Back to the casserole, we didn't manage to shred the cheese on the first attempt. (A copy of the food processor instruction manual would have been nice.) Instead, I put all the accessory pieces together wrong and squished the cheese.

After some trial and error, we were soon shredding cheese at an astonishing rate. If I'd gotten this right the first time, it would have been twice as fast as using a normal grater. Instead, I think I delayed dinner by at least ten minutes.

Next, we got to why I had the food processor out: the cabbage. This seemed like one of those recipes where you want the cabbage in very fine slivers, which I can't do by hand (though I'm better than I was). Also I just wasn't in the mood for a lot of hand-slicing.

Are we using equal amounts of cabbage and cheese?

Now that we were done spending time trying to save time, it was time to get to the meat of the recipe. I forget where I read this (I think it was on Tumblr), but someone said "Half of all 'good family recipes' start with 'cream the butter and sugar,' and the other half start with 'brown the beef and onions.'" Naturally, we used frozen onions so I didn't have to chop them myself.

We are next directed to put the cabbage on top and let it steam for a bit. This strained our skillet's capacity, but we managed to get everything crammed in there and put foil on top. I really hoped the cabbage would shrink in the steam.

 

We are supposed to use canned crescent rolls for the top and bottom of this casserole. I used homemade biscuit dough because I forgot to get the cans.

Speaking of canned bread, I was going to write that if you halve the recipe, you can purchase two canned pizza crusts and fit it in a cast-iron skillet. Then I stopped by the canned biscuit section and checked the prices. Two cans of crescent rolls would have cost more than the beef! I'm not a snob (though I get how it can seem like that sometimes), but canned biscuits are absolutely not that good.   

Shopping aside, we were now ready to assemble. I accidentally made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Had I followed the directions, it would have been a simple matter of lining a 9x13 pan with bread dough and then tipping the skillet into it. Instead, we had to empty the pan long enough to put bread in the bottom first. So remember: even if a recipe is only ten sentences long, be sure to read the whole thing!

The recipe's final line of instruction confused me: "Cover with foil the last 10 minutes to soften the crust." I figured this would make sense when the time came. Ten minutes before the time was up, the top crust had hardened to a big cracker. Even though I didn't think anything could fix it, I put our runza casserole under a foil tent to finish out the baking time. The crust turned back into soft bread, which again proves that you should always read the recipe.

This was a lot better than I thought. It hit the same satisfying spot as the meatball-mushroom pie. It's hard to go wrong when your recipe starts with a pound of beef, a lot of onions, and bread on top. 

It's a really nice meal-in-one-pan for when you want meat, vegetables, and no fuss (assuming you don't find canned biscuits too expensive). When I was making this, I thought it might need more vegetables in it. But I think it had the perfect meat-to-cabbage ratio. It's simple, but satisfying. And if you remember to get canned biscuits and don't mind the expense, it's pretty fast to put together, too. 

It was a lot better when I halved the filling to match my half-size pan, though.  

 

Meatball-Mushroom Pie: or, Some things are too good to care how they look

I can't argue with a single thing that goes in this recipe.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie 1 pound ground beef (as lean as possible) ½ teaspoon salt Black pepper to taste 2-4 tbsp cooking oil 1 medium onion, diced 6 tablespoons flour 1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced up to 3 cups cold water Salt and pepper Biscuit dough (recipe follows) Heat oven to 325°. Make the biscuit dough. Cover it to prevent it drying out (setting a dinner plate on top of the mixing bowl will be good enough), and set it aside. Mix beef with salt and pepper. Form it into small balls. Heat oil in a frying pan (or ovenproof skillet) over medium-high heat. Add the meatballs and toss around in the frying pan until lightly browned and partially cooked. You may need to brown the meatballs into multiple batches. Remove the meatballs from the pan. Add the mushrooms and onion. Season with salt and pepper to taste and cook until done, about ten minutes. Stir in the flour, quickly beating out any lumps. Then gradually add the water until you have a thick gravy (you may not use it all). Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if needed. Remove most of the gravy to a small saucepan, leaving enough to generously coat the mushrooms and onions. This is easier if you pour it by the ladle-full through a strainer or slotted spoon, and then tip whatever it catches back into the frying pan. Return the meatballs to the frying pan and stir well. Add more gravy if needed. If your frying pan is not oven-safe, pour its contents into a baking dish which you have coated with cooking spray. Roll the biscuit dough out to fit the pan. Lay it over the pie. Cut some holes for venting. Bake about 40 minutes, or until golden on top.     Biscuits 1½ cups flour 1 tbsp sugar 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (or beef fat) ⅓ cup milk 1 egg Mix the dry ingredients together. Cut in the beef fat (or shortening) like a pie crust. Add the milk and egg. Knead 12 times. Set aside until the pie is ready for it. To make biscuits (instead of using the dough as the top crust for this pie), heat oven to 425°. Roll the dough out until it's a half-inch thick. Cut into circles of desired size, and lay on a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with milk. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until golden. Mrs. J M Donahue; 7049 Greenwood Avenue, Stonehurst Hills, Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11 Biscuit dough adapted from Pillsbury's Meat Cook Book, 1970 via Mid-Century Menu on the Wayback Machine

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

It's hardly news that nowadays, beef is a priced like a premeditated splurge instead of something you toss into the grocery cart next to the frozen spinach and the Windex. When I flip through older cookbooks (which I sometimes read instead of novels), I am amazed at how much beef people used to put into their food every day.

With that in mind, I saw these magazines at an antique store recently.

I am tempted to say that the magazine cover proves prove that some things never change. But I did some research (by which I mean I talked to my parents) and learned that apparently beef was very cheap until the prices shot up in the 1970s. (Note that the magazine is dated April 1972, just in time for the beginning of grilling season.) My mother said that before then, they used to grill T-bone steaks as casually as I grill pork chops.

So if we were making today's recipe when it was first printed, it would have been a lot more economical than it is now. And so, let's get to our starring ingredient!

This is the reason I haven't made this recipe before.

The recipe says to form the meat "into small balls." With that in mind, I decided to scoop out the meat by the tablespoon. In short order, we had a plate of salted and peppered balls of extravagance.

Because we at A Book of Cookrye are always economizing, I did not put our meatballs into a pan coated with cooking oil. Instead, I cooked them in beef fat. As I have mentioned, the rising price of beef has led me to obsessively save everything I drain from the frying pan. The beef fat in today's recipe represented 20% of the purchase price, and I refuse to send grocery money to the city dump. (Also, it turns out we're nearly out of oil.)

Cheapskatery aside, beef fat seems more period-correct than oil. Yes, cooking oil existed back then. But based on the recipes I've seen, people didn't start their dinners with a splash of oil in a hot frying pan until well after the Depression was over. Maybe people in those days also obsessively saved every cent of grocery money that they drained out of various meat-laden skillets.

Having melted the fat, Mrs. Donahue tells us to "lightly brown" the meatballs. Here I should note that I never make meatballs on the stovetop, instead favoring the more foolproof method of putting them in the oven to mind their own business. This picture shows why.

Pushing meatballs around a frying pan is a skill, and I do not have it. Fortunately, I didn't have to completely cook them at this stage. (I'm assuming "lightly browned" means halfway cooked.) 

Having made an embarrassment of the beef, it was time to remove it from the pan and fail to convince myself that things would get better before the end of the recipe.

 

The plate of half-cooked, malformed meatballs would prove the aesthetic low point of this endeavor. But although things got better from here onward, the pie never turned into a visual masterpiece. 

In case you forgot there was a Depression on when this recipe came out, Mrs. Donahue uses a mountain of mushrooms and onions to stretch a single pound of beef into dinner for five. Granted, her recipe calls for canned mushrooms instead of fresh. But I added about the same amount of mushrooms by weight.

I thought the skillet might prove inadequate, but the mushrooms shrank as they cooked. After a few minutes, I dared to hope that the meatballs might actually fit in the pan. 

At this point, Mrs. Donahue's directions got a bit confusing. The part where we add flour and then water to make a gravy was straightforward enough. But one sentence after telling us to make a gravy with the mushrooms in the pan, she seems to tell us to skim off the excess gravy and then return the mushrooms to the pan. 

I had to reread the recipe several times before I realized I'm supposed to transfer everything from the frying pan to a baking dish. In theory, I'd scoop everything out with a slotted spoon, and then add just enough of the gravy to hold all together. The remaining gravy should stay in the frying pan until serving time, at which point everyone gets to spoon it over their pie.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye really like a single-pan recipe, so Mrs. Donahue's instructions got tactfully ignored.

After adding the flour to everything in the pan, our mushrooms and onions got a lot less photogenic. I'm not very good at flour-lump prevention. But even a perfectly smooth gravy wouldn't have prevented this from looking like dog food.

Mrs. Donahue has us adding three cups of water (that's 7-ish deciliters for our metric friends), which seemed a bit excessive to me. I was almost certain that adding nearly a quart of water would turn our gravy into a runny failure. Therefore, I went with the well-used method of gradually adding water until everything looked right. As expected, we used a lot less than Mrs. Donahue ordered.

And so, it was finally time for our meatballs to get back into the pool.

I had to look up Mrs. Donahue's address. Did she live in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country? Because this seemed perfect for feeding hungry miners. 

Well, you probably aren't surprised to find out that a town with a well-heeled name like "Stonehurst Hills" isn't near any mines. There isn't even a local steel mill. Instead, it's only a short streetcar ride away from Philadelphia.

Don't you hate when dinner looks like someone already vomited it back up?

Mrs. Donahue says to cover the pie with a "rich biscuit dough," but doesn't give a recipe for that. To be fair, this pie came from the newspaper. Printing a biscuit recipe under the main instructions would have used up precious column-inches and crowded other people out of the Recipe Exchange. Also, anyone who hadn't skipped home economics class probably didn't need directions to make biscuits.

I used the biscuit recipe that came from the disastrous cherry-ham cobbler. In keeping with the bovine theme of the recipe, I made the biscuit dough with beef fat. We have already learned that beef fat makes better biscuits than shortening. I then tried to tell myself that the mushrooms under the beefy bread count as a serving of vegetables.

As I laid the dough over the simmering mess in the pan, I thought to myself that canned biscuits might have been an ideal way to reduce the time and bowls that this recipe demands. I then considered that perhaps twenty years after Mrs. Donahue's recipe got printed in the newspaper, she might have modernized it by using canned cream of mushroom soup and canned bread dough.

Setting aside canned foods and returning to the pie at hand, I tried to make a decorative design with the excess dough trimmings. I don't think I succeeded.

Mrs. Donahue has us baking this pie at 425° for "about 40" minutes. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. On the one hand, that seemed like we'd burn the pie. On the other hand, we had a lot of raw beef under the rich biscuit dough. 

I cautiously trusted Mrs. Donahue's baking instructions, but I set the timer to go off ten minutes early anyway. I should have returned to the kitchen earlier still. Fifteen minutes after going into the oven, the pie was offensively well-done.

I should have seen this coming. A lot of our recipes from the Recipe Exchange never quite work as written. Indeed, this isn't even the first time the Recipe Exchange gave us a ruinously high baking temperature. 

Fortunately, only the top of the pie was overcooked. The biscuit dough underneath the half-burnt crust had turned into perfect bread. And the oven didn't harm the meatballs underneath.

I rarely write about the leftovers, but I have to note that while this pie could at best be called "homely" when fresh from the oven, it looked like pig slop when transferred to a storage container.

But the pie was too delicious to care how unsightly it looked. There are some leftovers that you only eat because you know how much grocery money went into making them. This pie was so good that I put the leftovers on the bottom refrigerator shelf and pushed them all the way back so no one thought to look for them.

Because I liked the pie so much, I made it again as soon as the grocery budget permitted. This time, I did a much better job of mixing in the flour without any lumps. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes a successful mushroom mud.

Emboldened by our improvement, I decided to dump the all three cups of water that the recipe demands into the pot all at once. After all, the flour was completely and thoroughly mixed in, which meant it would theoretically have better thickening powers than it did last time. And while that may have been true, we ended up with mushrooms floating in cloudy water. Our "gravy" tasted as diluted as it looked.

On the bright side, we had enough gravy to pour on top of the pie as well as bake in it. Things were going as the recipe intended. 

Incidentally, you can tell that this recipe comes from a time when money was tight. Instead of using up more grocery money making sauce to pour on top of the pie, we are directed to take it out of the pie itself.

I added more seasonings to the, um, "gravy" to make it taste less like water with mushrooms that fell in by accident. Then I added more flour because it was barely thicker than tap water. If this isn't how the recipe's supposed to look, it's got to be pretty darn close.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever poured gravy onto biscuits.

This recipe is unapologetically from before the social media era. While more adept hands could have made a prettier pie than I did, Mrs. Donahue clearly didn't care if this pie was good enough for Instagram. I actually like when recipes don't care about being good enough for a Tiktok video. 

Anyway, because I hate posting recipe directions that don't work (and also because I really like this pie), I made it a few weeks later. This time, I gradually added enough water to our befloured mushrooms to make a gravy without ruining it. Since I didn't over-dilute it, the resulting gravy tasted wonderfully of all the mushrooms, beef, and onions that were in it.

I then found a near-instantaneous way of separating out the gravy that is supposed to go on top.

Despite getting the recipe right, the actual pie looks like a dog's dinner before we put a crust on top. But it smelled amazing.

As baking time arrived, I decided to try another possible recipe error. The original directions call for baking the pie at 425° for forty minutes. (For our metric friends, 425°F is a searing 220°C, and forty minutes is 24 hectoseconds.) As previously mentioned, I thought the pie needed such a long and extra-hot baking time to cook the raw beef within. But every time we made it, the pie would be nearly burnt long before forty minutes had elapsed. 

After multiple nearly-burnt pies, I thought that perhaps someone in the Philadelphia Inquirer's typesetting department had accidentally grabbed the wrong number from the type drawer when they got to the baking temperature. (It has happened before.) And so, I reduced the temperature to a more moderate 325° (160° for our Celsius friends).

Our resulting pie was golden and perfect right on schedule. And because it was in the oven for 40 minutes, we knew that the meat was completely cooked by the time it was done.

In closing, this tastes so good. It's hard to argue with beef, onions, and mushrooms, but Mrs. Donahue took a promising group of ingredients and made them even better than expected. This pie is the dinner you want to come home to. I had feared it would be underseasoned and bland, but it came out far better than it needed to. I think that putting the meatballs into the pan while half-raw allowed the mushroom juices to penetrate them as they finished cooking.

However, today's pie involved a lot more mixing bowls most single-pan meals. As another cleanup note, I baked this in a cast-iron skillet so I could do it all in one pan. Unfortunately, the errant splatters of gravy (of which there were many) welded themselves to the iron. Even though I cleaned the pan before it had time to get cold, it was as hard to wash as if I'd let it dry on the countertop for several days. So, you may want to do the stovetop part of this recipe in an ordinary, dishwasher-safe frying pan. You can then transfer the hot mushrooms and meat into a casserole dish that can soak overnight in the sink without rusting.

Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup (or more) grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste, corn, and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the meat, cover, and simmer. While the sauce is simmering, heat oven to 350° and cook the pasta in salted water. Drain the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 16 August 1935, page 8

I'm fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address right after their name. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The taste of the sauce reminded me of the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college. You could tell upon the first taste that it had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.