Comfort Food Craving: Tater Tot Casserole

Sometimes, a girl gets a craving for a good 'ole casserole. Aka hot dish. There's just something extra comforting about a warm, layered, creamy bowl of mixed together food. My Mom's standby hot dish was tuna casserole, topped appropriately with crushed potato chips. While I have made her recipe a few times in my life, when I got the casserole craving last week I decided to try something new: tater tot casserole. What's not to love about anything topped with tater tots??

After browsing around the interwebs for a vegetarian recipe (there are soooo many variations of this) I settled on this one but modified it a bit. Here's how I made it.

Ingredients

• Olive Oil
• 1/2 small onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 8 oz package mixed veg (I used a peas, carrots, and corn mix)
• 8 oz package frozen corn (because I already had it)
• 1 1/2 cup cream of mushroom soup, not the condensed kind. 
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 cup aged cheddar, shredded
• package of frozen tater tots

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Pour a glug of olive oil into a 9x13 casserole dish and spread it around.

Heat another glug of olive oil over medium heat in a medium sized saucepan. Add onions and cook until almost translucent. Add garlic and cook for another minute or two. Add frozen veg mix, S&P, and cook until just heated through, tossing whenever you think of it.

Dump the veg mixture into casserole dish and spread it out. Pour in soup. I can't remember exactly how much soup I used. I had one of those fancy 32 oz cardboard box soups and I know I used less than half. Mostly you don't want the mixture to be too soupy, so add just enough soup to submerge the veg mixture by about two thirds. Give it a stir. Sprinkle evenly with cheese, then arrange tater tots in obsessively even rows over the whole shabang.

Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 10-15 or until the tater tots are browned and crispy to your liking. Let it sit and cool for a bit and enjoy. 

Finally, I'll add that this makes excellent leftovers, which is actually when I took the picture above.