Month-of-One-Pan Meals: Hot Chicken Salad Casserole

Welcome to my annual Month-of Recipes on this blog. Go rummaging in the attic here and you’ll find past recipe months for appetizers, chicken, soup, mini-desserts, and more. The way it works is, for each day in February I post a recipe that fits the category. This month is one-pan meals, excluding pizza, most casseroles, and slow cooker recipes.

I've seen a bunch of recipes that riff on the traditional chicken salad, but serving hot chicken salad for dinner is relatively new. There are recipes out there for you to try if you don't like mine. But, seriously, how can you not like mine, right? This one is taste-tested by my harshest food critic, DH. (Well, not really. But he does tell me what he likes and what he doesn't.)

As you know from previous posts, I always have cooked chicken available to make a wide-range of quick meals. This one, because it makes a big casserole, uses four cups of that chicken you tucked into the freezer, making it good to clear out space as you feed a crowd. I know at the beginning I said I wouldn't fill up this month with casseroles, the original one-pan-meals option, but I had to make an exception for this tasty one. 

Don't let the long list of ingredients scare you off. You make two mixtures you toss together. This takes mere minutes to assemble, then sit back and enjoy the aroma of a baking chicken casserole. Dinner is all but done!

Hot Chicken Salad Casserole (serves 6-8)

1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese, divided

1 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup plain yogurt

3 tablespoons lemon juice

½ cup slivered almonds, toasted

4 cups cooked chicken, shredded

4 ½ ounces mushrooms, cut into pieces

2 cups celery, in small chunks

½ cup onion, diced

¼ cup pimiento, diced

8 ounces water chestnuts, sliced

½ teaspoon each salt and pepper

1 cup potato chips, crushed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In small bowl, mix well one cup cheddar, cheese, mayonnaise, plain yogurt, and lemon juice. Set aside. 

In large bowl, mix well the chicken, mushrooms, celery, onion, pimiento, water chestnuts, and salt and pepper. 

Add sauce to chicken mixture and stir to combine thoroughly.

Put mixture in greased 13"x9” pan and top with remaining cheddar cheese and potato

chips.

Bake for 30 minutes until bubbly. Serve immediately.

DH's Rating: 5 Tongues Up

"This is filling!"

"Yeah, I know, but do you like it?"

"It's good. Really rich tasting. This isn't a diet food, right?"

You got it, Big Boy!

Month-of-Few Ingredients: Chicken and Noodle Leftovers to Love

You know those days, like in the Chopped television kitchen, where you just open up the refrigerator door and say, “What’s for dinner?” Yeah, like that.

Well, I had one of those a little while ago and I scrambled to figure out what in the heck DH was going to be eating that night. I’d had a great day at the computer working on manuscripts and frankly forgot my other role: Feeder-in-Chief. So there it was, 6:00 and it struck me that I didn’t have a dinner plan.

Normally, I’m pretty good. I make menus, shop for the ingredients, and everybody gets fed good stuff on time. But not that night. Okaaaaay. Now what?

Fortunately, I always cook too much of whatever I’m making so that I can speed up dinners with prepared foods ready to repurpose. It was gonna be one of those nights. So I did a quick inventory. I had some noodles in the freezer leftover from when we had creamy mushroom pasta (tastes just like beef stroganoff). In the refrigerator was some roast chicken and some turkey gravy. There were some mushrooms on their way to dehydration. There was about ¾ of a bag of spinach, too. Oh, there was other stuff, but those five seemed more compatible with one another.

The recipe that follows is approximations. I didn’t measure anything because I was using up leftovers. You okay with that? This is a very quick dinner since you are mainly recombining ingredients.

Chicken and Noodle Leftovers to Love (serves 4-6)

About 4 cups cooked noodles

About ¾ bag of fresh spinach

About 1 cup shrively mushrooms

About 1 ½ cups turkey gravy, peppered and heated in microwave

About 2 cups cooked and shredded chicken

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Spray casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray.

Toss noodles into heavily salted boiling water to heat noodles (and in my case thaw). Don’t over cook. You just want them hot.

Toss spinach and mushrooms into boiling noodles and immediately drain the noodles. This partially cooks the spinach and mushrooms.

Put noodles mixture into casserole dish and stir in gravy that you reheated in the microwave.

Stir in chicken. Bake for about 15 minutes in oven (or until hot). Serve immediately.

DH’s Rating: 5 Tongues Up  Him: “What do you call this?” Me: “Dinner.”

Him: “No, really.” Me: “Your favorite. Casserole.” Him: “Whatever you call it, it’s really good.” Me: “Whew.”

A reminder:

House rules for what counts as an ingredient:

Salt and pepper are not ingredients.

Oil is not an ingredient when it’s for the cooking pan, not the recipe.

Water is not an ingredient.

If you liked this recipe, I’d really appreciate you spreading the word on your social media outlets. Here are some pre-made Twitter and Facebook posts you can use or modify.

Twitter: Easiest #recipe for for leftovers you’ll ever find. Check out Chicken & Noodles Leftovers to Love by @good2tweat at http://bit.ly/2kYBiCr

Facebook: Need dinner really fast? These five leftovers led to the creation of Chicken and Noodle Leftovers to Love! Posted on Sharon Arthur Moore’s blog, Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time at http://bit.ly/2kYBiCr

Dinner is Served

We open up our cabin in the cool pine country of Arizona in three stages. It’s a process to prepare for closing one house and opening the other for six months each year.

As temps soar here in the Valley of the Sun, the time has come. It’s always a big deal to pack up the first load, go north, unload, and then return to Phoenix. That makes dinner a problem.

Dinner is rarely a problem at our house. Partly because, bless his heart, DH WILL eat anything! Truly. Never a problem. No the problem on the moving days is we get back late and if I didn’t plan ahead, what do we eat?

It happened this week. Home after 6:30. We normally eat at 7 after playing a rousing game of cubes.  Okay, so I did a quick refrigerator inventory. What follows is the recipe. Seriously, don’t hold me to measurements here. We’re talking leftovers. I would love to be on that cooking show, Chopped. Give me a basket of mystery ingredients. Pshaw! That’s what I do most days! And these people win $10,000???

DH loves casseroles, fortunately, so when he looked at the serving dish, he asked, “What’s this?” Instead of my usual snarky, “Dinner,”I replied, “Your favorite. Casserole.”

He poked around in the bowl, and announced. “Yes, my favorite Peoria Casserole.” Thus, the following:

Peoria Casserole

Leftover angel hair pasta, maybe 1 ½ cups

1 pkg chicken Swanson “Flavor Boost”™

2 big handfuls of fresh spinach

1 handful of fresh mushrooms

about 1 c leftover roast chicken and the drippings from cooking

Pam a casserole dish. Toss pasta with Flavor Booster. Mix in remaining ingredients. Cover. Microwave for 3 ½ minutes. Dinner is served.

Coincidentally, my new culinary mystery series is called “Dinner is Served”. The first book, Mission Impastable, will be out this summer from Oak Tree Press.