Time to go upstairs and heat dinner.

Wife is off to a choir rehearsal, leaving youngest son and I to our own devices for dinner. Know what I'm going to have. He's on his own.

After five days straight of gallipavo, my stomach urges went to Scotch-Norwegian stew. Which I prepared for dinner for us last night. And there is a bowl left over.

Okay, the wife cooked the hamburger. And she boiled the rice and nuked the corn. But I did the mixing, and that's everything for scotch-norwegian stew.

Came up with this one pot meal during one of my last summers at college. Erik, my summer roommate, was from Oslo, and tried to sustain himself with simple meals of rice and a vegetable. Corn, peas or beans, whatever he had handy. Just throw the frozen veggies in the rice when you start it cooking, add butter when done, and voila, a meal in a pot.

Yeah, if you eat like Melissa. (No offense Melissa, I am sure the time will come that my system says I have to eat that way, but until then, I want protein.)

Now I, on the other hand, was trying to find ways of making plain ground beef or deer appetizing, without spending money on any "helper."

So, you guessed it. We mixed my meat in with his Oslo stew. And then added cinnamon for flavor. And my favorite marmalade, Ocean Spray Cranberry-raspberry sauce.

Really.

Don't ask me for the recipe. There isn't one (which is why the wife prepares ingredients, and lets me prep the final dish). Basically, you add your corn to the rice (enough that it is still mainly white, but so that every spoonful, on average, will have some corn in it) and boil. (Wife had frozen packaged corn, instead of frozen kernel corn, so she had to nuke the corn separately, which works too.)

Cook up the burger in a skillet (okay, so it is a one pot and one skillet meal), drain, and then sprinkle liberally with cinnamon. You can add the cinnamon later to the rice mix, but it tends to be overpowering. Adding to the meat seems to work better.

When the rice and corn are done, add liberal amounts of margarine to taste, and stir in the cinnamon meat. Now comes the tricky part. You want the cranberry-raspberry sauce (which is really a gel) to stay cool, while the rice and meat should be hot. Slice the sauce into chunks about nickel to dime size, and stir into the mix.

Serve quickly, before the rice and meat cool, or the sauce warms.

I'll warn you, the resultant mixture looks horrid. Like it has already been eaten by somebody once (or twice, even). Do not try to impress company with this survival dish.

And leftovers do not reheat well. The cranberry-raspberry sauce kind of melts throughout, and you have something like warm pemmican.

But after days and days of dead bird and pizza, it was absolutely wonderful. Best batch in years.