Originally posted September 2010; Retrieved from the Way Back Machine
I cannot, for the life of me, imagine walking into a restaurant and selecting “Bulgarian Pepper Casserole” off the menu. I can’t. But Jan made it for the farm trip potluck and it was excellent. And then last week we got of an airplane in Atlanta, into a car, onto a highway. Three hours later we were slowly coming to terms with the fact that it was Sunday and we were tired and would need to make dinner out of groceries we hadn’t bought yet, starting from an empty pantry and for that we’d need a plan. So I pulled up the recipe. We couldn’t find feta or anything approaching greek olives at the Ducktown Piggly Wiggly, so I bought some jack cheese. I was really tired, so we only bought one onion and one green pepper. When we got to the cabin and there was absolutely no reception and my phone browser didn’t have the page cached, so I had to work from memory. We’d found a woman who sold brown eggs from her garage ($1.75/dozen, leave the money in the basket, take the eggs from the fridge), so we had some eggs and it made sense to me to add an egg to the ricotta, so I did. It came out pretty good. I bet with a recipe at hand it’d turn out even better.
Which brings me to this: I want to make more casseroles this fall. Just because. I don’t know why really. Before we left, Rachel and I assembled a sort of modified enchilada that got me thinking casserole. Onions cooked with roasted peppers (Zach and Rachel have a flame thrower, always fun to use) and a can of beans. Tortillas, softened a bit, wrapped around some cheese and drizzled with mole and some bean juice. Hippie food, but it came out good, especially for a meal that started with “Well, we have a can of beans somewhere, I think.”
