By Santee Ross, University of Montana

Moving away from my family to attend college affected me in more ways than one. The first thing I noticed missing in my life besides the usual family chaos was my mother’s cooking.

She always made the best meals, even when we had scraps and leftovers to work with. She made it work and sometimes those new inventions were better than the “original” recipes.

I miss a good old fashioned home cooked meal - rez style.

So in my new series of blogs I will feature a rez style recipe once a week to reminisce about my mother’s cooking. It’s also to share the recipes I know that rely on ingredients only native tongues can deem delicious, yee.

Let’s get started.

When I hear the word casserole I used to think of this nasty blob of iffy material people called food. What changed my world was when I discovered this delicious blob of iffy material my family calls tator tot casserole.

To be honest making this dish does indeed look iffy but the end result is worth it. I remember first making this dish for sweat because it can defiantly feed a large amount of people with little effort. Bonus tip, there are almost never leftovers because seriously what native is going to say no to cheesy potatoes?

Prep Time: Not including making this in between commercial breaks, 20-25 minutes
Cook Time: Play this one by ear because it’s up to you how well you want your tator tots cooked.
Yield: However much cheesy starch your little heart desires. That’s the beauty of Indian cooking, you can make the same recipe for two or twenty people.

So what you’ll need is:

• a bag of tator tots
• shredded cheese
• ground beef (about a pound or so)
• cream of mushroom (about two cans to every pound of hamburger)

Now I’m going to avoid exact measurements because I know you’re all experienced Indian cooks and can judge it by eye, jokes. I will give you ballpark or tips to help you out though.

Now let’s make some tator tot casserole:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 350. Start browning your hamburger.
2. Once your hamburger is cooked turn off the burner and add the cream of mushroom til you have a good hamburger to cream of mushroom ratio. This means it looks sort of gloppy, not soupy and watery but not totally dry either.
3. Now you put that iffy material in an oven pan with enough room on top to add the tator tots.
4. So you put your tator tots on top and line them side by side so that it looks like a bed of tators in neat rows. All closely packed like sardines, except sardines are nasty and this casserole is awesome.
5. Next you sprinkle your cheese on top of the tots. I usually get crazy here and add so much cheese it would be a lactose intolerant person’s worst nightmare--but it’s up to you how much to add.
6. Lastly you put it in the oven for about 20 or so minutes. All you really want is for the tots to be fully cooked and the cheese melted since the hamburger is already cooked.

Tip: Don’t burn it. Also cherry cool-aid somehow completes this dish nicely.