My Favorite Green Bean Casserole

The first casserole that I remember eating was made by my college friend/roommate Anne for a Thanksgiving dinner we celebrated away from our families back in the day when students who went out of state for college stayed out of state for the Thanksgiving holiday and fended for themselves to make some sort of a dinner. Anne had her family recipe for a casserole topped with corn flakes, and 20+ years later I vividly remember her casserole yet have no memories of ever eating one before that. I suppose that means I did not grow up eating them. In fact, I never eat them. I never make them. I never think about them. That has now all changed.

The January-February 2021 issue of Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street has a very intriguing recipe for a Ligurian Green Bean Casserole. It’s prefaced with this story about this particular Italian casserole that’s served on the street in paper bags for easy snacking. The story made me hungry so I thought I’d give this recipe a try.

It’s a lighter version of a casserole that uses mashed potatoes rather than heavy cream or cream of mushroom soup. Having almost all of the ingredients in my house, I tweaked their recipe ever so slightly by using house made veggie broth rather than water and by adding way more parmesan cheese than the recipe called for. I also halved their recipe to make just enough for a square pyrex, not a large portion for two people to eat all week long. Here is my version that I am adding to my favorites and will certainly be making again and again, and possibly in the larger format to snack on all week long.

Ingredients:

• 2 TB butter
• 1/2 pound red potatoes cut into small-ish pieces (the recipe called for Yukon gold)
• kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
• 2 cups veggie broth
• 2 TB olive oil
• 1 shallot, finely chopped
• 1/2 pound green beans (I used frozen)
• 4 ounces cremini mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
• 1 Tb minced fresh oregano
• 1 egg, beaten
• 5 ounces grated parmesan
• 1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs

Add 1 TB butter to a pan on medium-high and add potatoes and a pinch of salt once the butter melts. Stir the potatoes to coat, then pour in the broth, and cover until the potatoes are cooked. When they’re easily pierced with a fork, remove them from the heat and transfer them to a bowl to mash them by hand to the consistency of chunky mashed potatoes.

Return the pan on medium-high, add the olive oil, shallots, and a little more salt and cook about 5 minutes until the shallots are translucent but not brown. Add the green beans and sliced mushrooms and stir occasionally as they cook. Do not cook them all the way as they need to continue cooking in the oven. Pull them from the heat when the green beans are still bright green. Stir in the oregano right before turning off the heat. Transfer them to the bowl with the potatoes and mix to combine.

In another bowl, whisk the egg and mix in most of the parmesan, a little salt, and pepper. Fold this into the potato green bean mushroom mixture and then transfer to an oiled pyrex baking dish.

Heat the remaining oil and butter in a pan and coat the panko so it’s evenly moistened. Sprinkle over the potato mixture with some extra parmesan and bake at 400 for 30 minutes or so until bubbling at the edges.

This recipe is definitely a keeper in my opinion. The casserole itself is delicious. It’s great the following day with a fried egg on top as well. And the thing I appreciate most is this basic structure can be adjusted a little here and there with different potatoes, a variety of mushrooms, green beans or no green beans… I’ll have to see what I come up with.

Thanksgiving 2015

We had the honor and pleasure of cooking Thanksgiving again this year for a really great family.

I bought a local turkey as I did last year from Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud, CO. Unlike last year when I arrived at the farm to find a woman seated at a desk in the garage near a large refrigerator distributing chilled birds to anyone who had pre-ordered, this year I walked into a slaughtering/de-feathering/cleaning of turkeys small-scale processing line that I was not expecting at all. Our bird hadn’t even been chilled as she had been slaughtered just a few hours prior to pickup. Talk about having a real understanding of where our food comes from! I have that image seared into my memory… and will spare you the few photos I took.

We’re very fortunate to purchase such a quality turkey, so it’s extra important to me to serve it with all made from scratch accompaniments and sides.

I made the caramelized onion gravy base on Tuesday night. I’ve been making this gravy for more than ten years now, and each year I think it tastes better than the last. The butter and onions cooked low and slow for six hours. Six. Hours.

I started with a full pot and snapped a photo every couple of hours…

…until I couldn’t resist spooning it into my mouth.

Wednesday I made my pumpkin pie, but failed to snap a photo. I also made a cranberry sauce with roasted shallots and mandarin zest.

Thursday, Chef and I cooked the rest of the meal on site in their Boulder home. The beautiful bird went into the 325 degree oven after being rubbed with butter and herbs. She amazingly and somewhat surprisingly appeared done after just under two hours. That was a fast cooker!

I put together a wild rice stuffing while Sean made a sweet potato and chevre gratin, which has now become a Thanksgiving tradition for this family.

The ingredients in this dish are simply sinful- The health benefits of sweet potatoes are far outnumbered by the cheese and heavy cream combo. But, that’s what makes it so GOOD too!

While the gratin baked, Sean worked on maple glazed carrots in a cast iron skillet.

Next, he assembled green beans in shallot butter topped with fried shallots.

We added the pan juices to the gravy base, carved the bird,

And set up a small buffet for them.

We can’t wait until next year!

Green Bean and Purple Potato Salad

I love stopping by the Black Cat Farmstand at the Boulder Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings to see what Chef/Farmer Eric Skokan is harvesting. I’ve been getting into the habit of letting him suggest I try something, and then I ask him how I’m going to prepare it. He almost effortlessly rattles off a recipe to highlight something seasonal, and I rush home inspired to try it. This past week I bought his first harvest of green beans. They were a light green color, which leads me to believe they have some special name other than “green beans,” but for the purpose of this post, they were Black Cat Farm Green Beans. Chef Skokan suggested I blanch them, cool them off, and add them to a potato saldad in a mustard vinaigrette.  So, that’s exactly what I did. I bought a pound of local purple potatoes from the market that day and boiled them after blanching 2 big handfulls of the beans. When they were cool, I coarsely chopped them, mixed them with the green beans, and tossed them in a maple mustard vinaigrette. I let this chill in the fridge for a few hours before serving with turkey burgers and corn on the cob. A perfect summer meal. For a simple Maple Mustard Vinaigrette, whisk together:

•  2 TB Grade B Pure Vermont Maple Syrup
• 2 TB Dijon Mustard
• 1/4 cup Walnut Oil
• 1 TB Apple Cider Vinegar
• a splash of soy sauce

Homegrown and Canned Green Bean Salad