(View entire post here)

Next week in Brooklyn at the powerHouse Arena there will be a cook off featuring three recipes from my book!  One of these is Hamburger Casserole For When Nobody Loves You And Never Will, so I thought I would share with you the origins of this delicious food.

There are a only few family recipes passed on to me by my grandmother Mary Bucha.  She was a prolific cook, but a gourmand she was not.  Most of her recipes begin with the instruction "open a can of soup." Her cole slaw, in particular, is legendary. As a child I was terribly jealous of my older brother Jason for many reasons, but chief among them was that my grandma called it "Jason's Cole Slaw."  It wasn't his cole slaw.  It was everybody's cole slaw.  I loved it, too.

Recently my brother had Thanksgiving at our cousin Lisa's house, and when he promised to bring the cole slaw, Lisa reacted as though he were bringing a tin of caviar directly from the Caspian Sea. You would have thought it was a secret family recipe that had gone to the grave with Grandma, and that only Jason had had the foresight to write it down. Well, I'm here to spill the beans.  I had to give Jason the recipe for the precious cole slaw because he never bothered to ask Grandma for it.  It goes like this:

"Chop up a cabbage.  Either the big kind, or a Napa cabbage or Bok Choy. Any kind of cabbage.  Chop the whole thing.  Put it in a bowl and pour a bottle of Wishbone Italian Salad Dressing over it.  The whole bottle.  If you have some of that stuff they call ‘Salad Seasoning' you can sprinkle it on top."

I kid you not, that's it.  And so we come to the Hamburger Casserole, which is the perfect entrée to serve alongside Grandma's cole slaw.  This recipe also comes from Grandma Mary and was so essential to her culinary repertoire that when my parents were married, she actually wrote it down and handed it to my mother.  She couldn't fathom my dad not having access to the stuff.  Perhaps if she had made it more often they would still be married.  Once you try it, you will understand.

Everyone in my family makes it a bit differently.  The ratio of soup and noodles to beef and onions is debatable.  In fact my sister Becky and I almost came to blows over the subject at our other sister's wedding in France.  Never mind the exquisite Petit Poulet Avec Sauce Aux Poires on our plates; it was Hamburger Casserole on our minds. 

A word of caution: while you may play with the ratios, do not try and make this fancy.  I once requested the dish on my first trip home from college, and after a long drive was sorely disappointed to find that my mother had tried to gussy it up with green peppers and, of all things, rosemary.  A near riot broke out, and suffice it to say she never tried that again.

Today, this is my go-to food for comforting.  I dare you to feel otherwise.  You can find the recipe at www.eatyourfeelings.com.

Heather Whaley, Eat Your Feelings, Hudson Street Press, cookbook, recipes