Casserole Capers Continue

 
We all go way back with casseroles, don't we? Casseroles were a all-too-predictable and boring part of my childhood.  I didn't really rediscover casseroles until the River Guide phase of my life came along.  Back then it was called "dutch oven" cooking or baking or whatever.  Nobody called it casseroles but a lot of it was sort of the same kinda thing.  And then casseroles once again dropped off the radar. Out of sight. Out of diet.

But now casseroles are BAAACK!  Why?  Well, oddly enough, it has to do with heating our tiny 16-foot travel trailer.  Lately we've been doing some mildly cold weather camping. For example, the morning low September 8th was 23 degrees in Grand Teton National Park. Numerous things happen when it gets that cold.

First thing is that it gets danged cold INSIDE the travel trailer, too.  Second thing is the cold affects our 12 volt storage battery, making it far less efficient. Third thing is we're tempted to turn on the forced air furnace inside the trailer trailer.  Well, when we do that, it really drains the battery F-A-S-T!  The 1988 forced air furnace in our trailer uses a 12 volt fan to push the heated air into the trailer's living space, such as it is.  As anybody who uses 12 volt stuff knows, old electric motors suck a battery down like you read about.  

SO what to do?  Bake, bubba, BAKE!

Something in the oven quickly brings the trailer interior to a very comfortable, cozy level.  Yes, we keep a state-of-the-art carbon monoxide detector deployed at ALL times.  And we replace the detector every two years.  

Well, it's EZPZ to think of all sorts of things to bake in the morning....cornbread being a GOTO staple with muffins coming in a close second.  But what about a chilly afternoon? 

That's why and how casseroles suddenly reared their baking dish and caught our attention after all these years.  What a perfect afternoon way to heat the trailer.  Bake a casserole!  YEA!

First, we had to find a baking dish.  The traditional glass casserole dishes are out of the question in an over the road travel trailer.  What a nice way they would be to fill your living space with glass shards.  If would not be a matter of "if" they would shatter, simply a matter of "when."  A cast iron dutch oven is also out of the question.  Too bulky, too heavy, too unwieldy and too cumbersome for our arthritic wrists to handle....PLUS the fact most dutch ovens wouldn't even fit into our tiny travel trailer oven in the first place.  And there's more.  We sometimes camp where there is no water supply so sometimes conserving water is a Big Deal.  That means we sometimes don't have lots of water to wash dishes.  We needed an easy-to-clean casserole dish.

That's when we thought of a metal non-stick loaf pan.  We found a great one at Target for $7--two coats of ceramic on it.  It's the only online item we've ever found that had 100% 5-star reviews.  It's a Sweetie for sure.  It fits the oven perfectly.  It's lightweight but very stout.  The ceramic coatings are awesome non-stick surfaces. It easily fits into our "baking box".  I love the thing.

OK, so we have a casserole dish.  Now what?  Because it's been years since we baked a casserole, we were stumped.  First we turned to our cookbook library.  We have about 50 pre-internet cookbooks down in the basement pantry.  We picked out five books and combed through them looking for the proper recipe.  We thought we had a winner in a chicken-apricot casserole with water chestnuts. HAHAHA!  It turned out to be an epic disaster and went straight to the trash.  UGH!  What a mess.

So that firmly placed our casserole tale between our legs and we sulked off pouting for a few days.  How could a guy screw up a casserole?  Well, let me count the ways, buddy.  Finally on Sunday, September 20, 2020, we regained enough courage and optimism to try something else and it worked.  WHEW!  Now we can breathe a sigh of casserole relief and proceed on.

First, we bought a tray pack of 10 chicken thighs.  We pressure cooked them four at a time in the Insta Pot.  This removes most of the fat and really tenderizes the brown meat.  Then we removed the rest of the fat by hand and separated all the meat from the bones. There's still a little bit of fat in the meat itself but it's just enough to keep that meat from drying out.  We don't want to use chicken breast meat because it's so easy for that white meat to dry out and get really tough.  So, anyway, we now had our primary meat for a casserole dish but what to do next?

It didn't take long to decide on a casserole course of action.  We chopped up celery, red pepper and yellow onion.  Then we cooked up a batch of basmati rice.  We added one knife level cup each of celery, red pepper and onion to a saucepan.  We simmered the mix in one cup of lite coconut milk until the chopped veggies were almost "al dente."  We definitely didn't want them mushy.  Next we mixed in the can of cream of mushroom soup.  Then we measured two cups of the coarse-chopped chicken and two knife level cups of the rice and stirred all that into the veggie/soup mix.  We didn't add any herbs or spices because we wanted to see how the "native" mix would turn out. This mix was then poured into the loaf pan and baked (covered) at 350 degrees for 45 minutes in our travel trailer oven.  

Susun's a pretty fair-minded critic of my cooking.  If it's bad she tells me it's bad.  After my chicken apricot fiasco she said, "You better stick with cornbread."  So, I can trust her to tell me the truth and nothing but the truth.  We both enjoyed the delightful dish last night.  I woke up this morning and opened the refrigerator to grab some milk for my coffee and what should I see?

Ah...Sweet Success!

PS--The objective is to have the entire casserole mix pre-prepped, vac-packed in the Seal-A-Meal and frozen.  That way when we want to bake a casserole, we just open the pack, put it in the dish and, voila, the trailer is nice and cozy warm and we get a fun din-din, too.