Adventures in Cooking: Green Bean Casserole Supreme

If you've been following my Adventures in Cooking!, you'll notice that they often involve ingredients that I've acquired under unusual circumstances, and I'm trying to find innovative ways to use them up.

The key player in today's Adventure is the humble green bean. I buy my green beans frozen from Costco and eat them raw (after thawing, they have the consistency of cooked beans). But my most recent bag of green beans took an extraordinarily long time to get finished. After surviving two near-complete defrosts due to equipment and power failures, they had turned withered and mushy, and I could no longer stomach eating them alone.

But they were still edible; they just needed to be cooked and combined with other foods to disguise their flaws. What better way to prepare some inferior beans, than to whip them up into a green bean casserole?

I do not recall exactly when I discovered green bean casserole, but I know it was fairly late in life (maybe college?), and I know I fell instantly in love. If you think about it, green bean casserole is really no great shakes—basically it's a can of soup and some beans, but I think I was enchanted by the onion straws on the top, which I also had never tasted before, and which were crispy and fun. Well, in more recent years, I've discovered I have a sensitivity to onion and so I try to steer clear of onion straws, but I still harbor fond memories of my early experiences with the dish.

So, to use up my green beans, I vowed to make them into a casserole...but, since this was not going to be just any casserole side dish, but a full-on meal...I was going to turn them into green bean casserole on steroids!

Here are the steps to replicate my great Adventure in Cooking!:

1. Thaw and thoroughly drain your freezer-burned green beans
2. Cut green beans into 1-inch long slices
3. Preheat oven to 350°F
4. Dump green beans in a casserole dish
5. Top with 1 can of condensed cream of mushroom soup
6. Throw in the remains of a bag of cheddar cheese
7. Add in a handful of Quorn vegetarian Chik'n cutlets
8. Stir.
9. Grab a frozen hunk of sourdough bread, microwave for a minute, then tear into breadcrumbs and toss over top of the casserole.
10. Bake casserole at 350 covered for 25 minutes or thereabouts (it's hard to tell, because you naturally start cooking before the oven is fully preheated)
11. Uncover the casserole and bake about 10 minutes more.
12. Let cool for a few minutes, then eat!

The verdict? I do not love Green Bean Casserole on Steroids (but I'm going to call it Green Bean Casserole Supreme so that other people might be suckered by the nicer-sounding name)! Everything in it is too mushy except the breadcrumbs, of which there are not enough. I think I might have liked it better if I'd put the cheese on top rather than mixing it in, but there's no going back now! Fortunately, I still have a few more beans left over from my last Costco bag, so maybe I'll try this recipe again sometime. As soon as I've choked down all 5 of the remaining servings of this attempt...