Casseroles to Save Cash, Part 4

Tonight I made my fourth casserole in my cost savings plan. This one was a little retro, and very odd. It was a Chicken Curry Casserole. The ingredients included curry powder, coconut milk, and green olives. The flavor was...unexplainable. The color was...also unexplainable. Did people in the 1950's really eat things like this and think they were good? The coconut milk definitely clashed with the Indian curry powder, and the olives were just weird, but I definitely think it could be fixed up into something decent. Maybe get rid of the coconut milk, add chicken stock, precook the rice (it ends up hard in this incarnation), and leave the weird pimento-stuffed olives out completely.

Casseroles to Save Cash, Part 3

Tonight I made my third casserole to help me save money. I'm not normally a big fan of spaghetti due to some burnout from childhood, but I know it's a great way to save money since pasta is cheap. I picked a Baked Spaghetti Casserole since it looked cheap and easy. Although the casserole is pretty much ready to eat before it even goes in the oven, it does kind of come together during the baking time. I definitely think that the cream soups also help to cut some of the normal acidity of the tomato sauce, which is one of the reasons I dislike traditional spaghetti. Oh, and I cheated and bought angel hair pasta instead of traditional spaghetti since I hate the thickness of spaghetti. This casserole came together for about $10, mainly because of the cost of the ground beef and the as-ever overpriced green pepper.

Casseroles to Save Cash, Part 2

Tonight I made my second casserole in my effort to save some cash. The one I picked was Chicken with Mushrooms and Artichokes. Of course anything with mushrooms makes me happy, so this was definitely something I was looking forward to. The steps in the recipe were a bit long, and I'm still not sure what the tomatoes on the bottom of the casserole were for, but the chicken turned out deliciously tender. The artichokes added a tang to the sauce, and the cream bubbled down into the rice to pull it all together. I think this recipe cost me about $8 total (I used some items that were already in my pantry), so it definitely helped me save money.

Casseroles to Save Cash, Part 1

When I first saw a cookbook called The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever, I knew it was going to have a space on my shelf, especially now that I'm trying to trim down the amount of money going out of my bank account. So I went through the book and picked out four casseroles that met three criteria: 1) they sounded appetizing, 2) they were easy (no multiple steps), and 3) they didn't have a long, expensive ingredient list. Tonight I made the first casserole on my list, but I will blog all of them in turn.

The casserole for this evening was Finnish Salmon Casserole. It's basically matchstick potatoes, matchstick onions, and cubed salmon fillets. I decided to go with plain sliced potatoes and onions since I'm lazy, and I didn't feel like cutting a bunch of matchsticks. I layered everything in the dish, poured the milk and cream over the top, shook some breadcrumbs on top, and baked away. The casserole smelled amazing as it was cooking (I love the sweet smell of baking onions), but when I went to taste it, it was rather bland. I think the recipe definitely needs some sort of spice, maybe dill? But for how easy it was to throw together, I can't really complain. I plan to get about four meals out of it, and I figure it came out to about $3.50 a meal for this casserole (mainly because I didn't get the salmon on sale).