Saturday, May 26, 2012

Claire's Hot Casserole

This is the first recipe I’ve chosen to make from my Grandma G’s cookbook and I’ve chosen one of the many casseroles or ‘hot dish’s to start with.

Here is the recipe. This one illustrates a few things I’ve noticed about Grandma G’s cookbooks, the first being that she always lists the name of the person she got the recipe from if she asked for it. I see the same names repeated over and over although I don’t know who they are. You can also see she labelled it ‘Good’. She did this with a few throughout. Some are ‘Very Good’. Finally – the canned soup. My god the canned soup! This recipe has FOUR CANS of it!


Here are the assembled ingredients – without a can of tomato soup and the 2 pounds of ground beef. I forgot to put those out for some reason.


I was starting to doubt I even had a casserole dish big enough for this.

Two pounds is a lot of beef! I don’t eat a lot of meat and I almost never cook it for myself… so this is a lot of meat!


Here is the process happening… pasta boiling… meat browning… veggies being chopped into the casserole dish.


Okay veggies are chopped and it’s time to add the scariest ingredient… the one I really didn’t want to use. But heck… it’s in the recipe and the recipe is ‘Good’.


Oh god canned mushrooms are disgusting.


Okay… speaking of disgusting. Please note my artistic way of highlighting the four canned soups this recipe called for.


It’s about this point when I decided I needed to add my own ‘ingredient’ to the process.


Oh and yes – my dish isn’t big enough. The pasta isn’t even in there yet. According to Grandma G I should also add salt and pepper… I added pepper but I could not in good conscience add more salt to a recipe with four cans of soup! Sorry Grandma.

So I now have two of these casseroles. I hope I like it. Grandma G gave the option to either use buttered crumbs or crumbs and cheese so I thought I would at least sneak some freshly grated parmesan into the recipe.


And now we just pop it in the oven for…. What?!? An hour? But everything is cooked! Oh okay.


So here it is – final dish. I have to say it’s pretty much how you would imagine it would taste. Once in my life I have had hamburger helper and this kind of reminded me of that. I don’t know how good I think it is but I’m sure it’s very ‘Good’ when you are trying to feed a husband and three hungry boys on little money.


Next time: The strangest pie you have ever seen

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