Adventures in Cooking: Celery Surprise

Every great Adventure in Cooking! begins with a single ingredient—usually one that's been sitting around way past its expiration date and desperately needs to get cooked. Today the honor goes to a large collection of low-carb gluten-free sandwich buns, some of the last few relics of my ex-boyfriend's tenure as my roommate. I don't eat sandwiches very often – and when I do, I only use half a bun – and half of that time, it's the other half-bun from my last restaurant sandwich – so these singly-wrapped buns that he bought in bulk shortly before moving out have been cluttering up my freezer for almost a year.

But what do you do with buns when you don't eat a lot of sandwiches? Eating more sandwiches sounds like a sensible answer, but this adventurous chef has a better idea—top a casserole with them!

I have a soft spot for casseroles. They almost always involve cheese and carbs, cooking them often requires little more than stuffing them in an oven and forgetting about them for a half-hour, and they can be made from almost anything.

For this casserole, the "anything" was going to have to be celery, as I had a large bag of celery sticks in the fridge and I might as well make use of them!

Armed with my two key ingredients (celery and breadcrumbs), I scoured the internet for casserole recipes that included them both. The winner was "Creamy celery casserole" from Allrecipes. Of course, this particular recipe also featured a few other ingredients I don't have and don't even like, so I was going to have to employ my creativity. And my math skills. Since the original recipe serves 8, and that's a lot of meals for a singleton who might not even enjoy the finished product, my first step was to divide the recipe in half.

Mental challenges! That's what Adventures in Cooking! are all about!

The ingredients

• 4 pats of restaurant butter (hopefully this is approximately equal to 2 Tbsp)
• 1 heaping cup thinly sliced celery (because somehow in your mind, 4 divided by 2 equals 1, but 1 isn't quite enough when you look at it)
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (rounding up since 1 1/2 Tbsp requires too many spoons)
• 1/2 heaping teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• Some water, just a little
• 1 huge white mushroom and 3 smaller ones (because that sounds approximately equal to a half a can of them, right?)
• 2 tablespoons chopped green bell peppers
  
• 1 (2 ounce) jar chopped pimento peppers
• Forget the peppers and just use 2 carrots instead
• 1/2 really heaping cup shredded Cheddar cheese (no such thing as too much cheese!)
• 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs
• 1 Tablespoon butter, melted
• More bread crumbs (because, darn it, a cup of shredded bread comprises a surprisingly small amount of hamburger bun)
• More butter (because more buns)

The Steps

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. You don't have a can of mushrooms like the original recipe called for, but no surprises there—you came prepared! Slice your fresh mushrooms and microwave for about 99 seconds. Pour off water.
3. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, and cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes. Move celery aside, and mix in flour and salt. Pour in milk, and mix all ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened. (Seriously, original recipe? That's like at least 4 steps...but I'm about to turn it into more!)
4. Cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes.
5. Surprise! Since you improvisationally added carrots to this recipe, you need to pre-cook them as well! In between stirs of celery, chop carrots into bite-sized pieces. Add to celery and butter and continue stirring.
6. Move celery aside, but to where, original recipe? This saucepan's all full of surprise carrots! Dump flour and salt all over tiny cleared area in bottom of saucepan as well as all over the celery and carrots. Stir quickly, lest the flour get singed.
7. Surprise! Since you don't have milk, you have to make milk from powder. As a general rule, you use 1/3 the amount of milk powder as the total amount of milk you want, so roughly fill 1/3 of the 1/2-cup measure you're using with powdered milk, then fill the rest with water.
8. Mix milk powder and water with other ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened.
9. If you've been improvising correctly, it should thicken almost immediately, so sprinkle in some extra water to reassure yourself that you've used enough liquid.
   
10. Stir mushrooms and...nothing else, because you don't like peppers...into mixture.
11. Mix in cheese, and stir until melted.
12. In a small bowl, blend bread crumbs and melted butter.
13. Transfer the celery mixture to a medium baking dish, and sprinkle with the bread crumb mixture.
14. Surprise! Not only does 1/2 cup of crumbled bread only use up 1/6 of the three hamburger buns you thawed, but it also doesn't even begin to cover the top of this wide, shallow casserole. Crumble up the remainder of Bun #1 and mix with another tbsp. of butter. Sprinkle on top of the casserole.
15. Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until lightly browned.

Congratulations! You have converted a simple 4-step recipe into a 15-step magnum opus, and hopefully, in the process, produced an edible casserole. 

Surprise! Due to the magic of fuzzy math, you'll probably only be able to wheedle three servings out of this ostensibly 4-serving half-a-casserole. But that's fine, because you've still got a lot of hamburger buns to get rid of. It'll be no time at all before you're ready to go back to Plan A: Eating more sandwiches.