Casseroles: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Sometimes I am a food snob, maybe I should clarify, and I am a recipe snob. If the recipe doesn’t come from a reputable source aka America’s test kitchen I am a little bit skeptical. I don’t like recipes from ward cookbooks, family reunion cookbooks, or recipes recommended by someone’s friend’s sister’s old college roommate. I know that some of these recipes are good, but others are… truly horrific. The other morning I had a conversation with my brother in law about this. I think it is safe to say that we are both against casseroles; I think that most people should be against casseroles. As we were discussing that we decided we might need to do a little research, so Jared pulled down a battered old ward cookbook, there were some gems in that book. We found one casserole that was truly disgusting, just the ingredient list gives me the heebie jeebies (yes the heebie jeebies). The recipe included egg noodles, ground beef, spaghetti o’s (yes the nasty canned pasta), and a few more things I cant even remember. I left that experience asking myself the following questions: who eats this stuff, how do people that eat this stuff get the nutrition to survive from these non edible meals, and how do you even think this stuff up? Seriously, who thinks that cream of mushroom soup, egg noodles, cheese (yes just cheese not a specific type of cheese), tuna OR “hamburger”, tomato soup, corn chips, and maybe some frozen vegetables make a delicious dinner? When you can substitute the meats that is a little bit of a problem… well maybe not, I just don’t have any experience with casseroles so I don’t actually know.

Jared and I came to the following conclusions about casseroles

1. Casserole recipes are created by mothers who have lots of children and little time

2. Casserole ingredients are determined by mothers that haven’t had time to go to grocery store in a week or so because of all their other duties and responsibilities

3.   

3.    3. Casseroles are how most people use their food storage (and why we need companies like Deals to Meals)

4.    

4.    4. The addition of ingredients like tomato soup, vegetable soups, and frozen peas are the only way many mothers can get their children to eat green things

5.     

5.    5. Casseroles are okay for kids, but maybe not the best option for people over age 8

So after all of this I have to ask, do any of you have good casserole recipes, can you think of any really good recipes, are you willing to share them?

* To be fair there are some casseroles I like…well one I can think of, Brian’s grandma makes a delicious casserole called “chicken dressing casserole”, it is seriously delicious and you all should try it, but other than that casseroles are not good.