They can be good . . . or evil.

I love casseroles. You can ask my best friend Jim. I love them. I love making them. I know they're retro, and they can hark back to a dark and medieval time in the gourmet world, when people liked the idea of Glop in a Pot (courtesy of James Lileks). People threw anything they found into a casserole dish, and that was dinner. Macaroni & cheese was considered gourmet Italian cooking, what with the word that ended in "i" in the title and whatnot.

Casseroles can suggest laziness. They can suggest a lack of ingenuity, a lack of creativity. They suggest a miserable lack of taste.

At the same time, they hark back to a time when women did, well, everything. Men went off and made money, and their wives stayed at home and had babies and cleaned everything and washed all the clothes and ironed all the shirts and cleaned the whole house and and and and and.

And in all of that, they made dinner.

So while we, in 2011, with our microwave ovens and our instameals and our Pac-Man and our Dan Fogelberg, denigrate the craptastic casseroles of yore, there's a certain beauty in them.

Because, sometimes, I'll bet that some of these women, who had gotten up before their husbands, and ironed their clothes, and made them breakfasts that would cripple a farmer, and gotten all the kids up, and made their breakfasts too, and dressed everybody, and gotten everyone out the door, and made sure the baby wasn't choking, and then cleaned the whole house . . . these women eventually said, "You know what? I'm going to drink a bottle of gin. And I'm going to throw a bunch of shit in a pan, and they're going to damn well eat it, because I'm tired."

I approach casseroles with both a healthy skepticism and a great love. There are some amazing ones out there . . . and there are some that are miserable failures.

So I'm going to celebrate all of them in this new blog:

The interesting new take . . .

The delicious comfort food . . .

The well-meaning, but bland . . .

And the Glop in a Pot, aka "Suburban Housewife's Subversive Statement." This one will get the hardest time, the most scorn, the least admiration . . . but it's with the understanding that, 3 gin martinis into the laundry, sometimes you have to say "Screw this noise" and dump a bunch of shit into a pan.