Hecka

The terrible, horrible, no-good first fifteen minutes of my Monday
So you know when you wake up, and you’re like–wow, it’s a new day! Let’s go have a relaxing cup of coffee and nutritious breakfast. And then you go into the kitchen and first discover that your cats have taken your knitting yarn and woven it in and out of the legs of all of your furniture in the living room, kitchen, sunroom, and study? And then you see you see one of the cats showing signs of yet another bladder infection? And then you walk down to the laundry room and see that another cat has completely ransacked the litter box? And then you have to clean up the whole mess?

And that’s the moment you say to yourself: wow, I have too many cats?

Yeah, that was how my Monday morning started. Thankfully the week has improved since then. Phew–talk about solving many crises at once! Darn–if they weren’t so darned cute, maybe I’d offload one or two cats!

Hecka
This dish comes from Sandi W.’s aunt, Olivet Anderson. Sounds like a basic hamburger combination with ground beef, onions, soy sauce, celery, carrots, and water chestnuts, with some bouillon and flour to hold it all together.

I looked up the word “hecka” because I’d never come across it before as the name of a main dish. But it turns out google has never heard of it either. The only definitions that come up are in the urban dictionary. “Hecka” is a shortened form of “heck of a”–not exactly the definition I was looking for. Oh well. If anyone knows what hecka is, let me know!

I decided to replace the ground beef with ground turkey. To that I added diced onion. I always love it when I can make more than one meal at a time. This time, since I was planning on making chili this week, I cooked the ground turkey and onion for both the chili base and the base of the hecka recipe. Nice!

I must admit I wasn’t expecting much when I cooked this recipe. It seemed kinda hum drum. But it’s a satisfying, basic dish with a bit of an Asian flair due to the water chestnuts and soy sauce.

The recipe calls for it to be served over chow mein noodles or rice. That would be good as well. I was also thinking this might be a good base for lettuce wraps. I made them with chicken, chopped water chestnuts, and seasonings.