Cooking

Sometimes I have to balance on the line between being an objective, detached humourist or being completely self indulgent. Well, tonight I'm going for the latter. I made a casserole tonight. That's right, I cooked something. With ingredients. It didn't come out of a carton with remove plastic cover and bake at 400 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes written on the side, nor a box with instructions to microwave at high for four minutes. I made a casserole from scratch tonight, and it was tasty. What's more, it cost me very little, and there's lots left over for tomorrow, maybe the next day too. Frankly, I'm proud of myself.

For those readers that don't know me (hopefully the bulk of my readers, but somehow I doubt it), I'm 26, I live with roommates, and my usual idea of cooking involves putting chicken strips and French fries (I prefer the Beefeater ones, they're more substantial, and they take just the right amount of time to cook) in the oven. That or opening a can with the word (and I use the term loosely) Boy-ar-dee on the label. Needless to say, when one of my roommates arrived home, and asked if I was busy, and I replied that I wasn't, but I had a casserole in the oven he was somewhat surprised. And when I say somewhat, I mean highly. So later on when I caught up with some friends, the first thing they asked was what kind of casserole had I made. Word gets around quickly.

So now I'm going to do something that's a first for this site. I'm posting a recipe. This is not a difficult recipe. It's really, really ridiculously easy, in fact. I'm going to provide all the instructions in plain, impossible-to-mess-up language so you too can experience:

Marko's Chicken Jalapeno Casserole

One chicken breast, cooked. I snagged a leftover from dinner a few days ago. Cost: Zero.
One bag of hash browns. I actually used half a bag of French fries, they were on sale, and once broken up a bit they're just bigger hash browns. Cost: 99 cents.
One can of cream of mushroom soup. I went with the store brand stuff, it was cheaper, and had less sodium. Cost: 59 cents.
One onion. I got one of these when I got the leftover chicken. Cost: Zero.
One small jalapeno. This was an unplanned element, but I think it really made the casserole. Cost: 20 cents.
A few small carrot circles. Someone had a bag of frozen veggies in the freezer, it was pretty well iced up, so I snagged maybe five discs of carrot out of it. Cost: Zero.
A shake or two of ground black pepper and salt. I didn't actually have any black pepper in the house, so I used crushed red pepper instead. Nice and lively. Cost: Zero, assuming you already have pepper and salt.

Take a small to medium sized casserole dish, you might want to put a little butter or margarine on the bottom and sides to prevent stuff from sticking. Start preheating the oven to 400° Fahrenheit at this point, maybe a bit later if you don't chop stuff quickly. Chop up the chicken, peel the onion and chop it up, wash the jalapeno, remove and discard the stem, center, and seeds, then chop what's left into small pieces. Chop up the carrot pieces. Dump the hash browns (or in my case, French fry pieces) into the casserole dish with the chopped ingredients, open can of soup and pour all of it in, then add pepper and salt. Stir this all up with a big spoon (a wooden spoon works best, but I got by with the largest soup spoon I had handy). Cover the casserole dish (if it has a cover, great, if not, use foil) and pop this in the oven for about 50 minutes. Now you just have to wait. That's all there is to it.

Feel free to vary this up a bit. Maybe use green pepper instead of the jalapeno, for example. Got some corn handy? Toss some in. Ditto for green beans or broccoli. Casseroles are easy and forgiving, so be adventurous. You can even use peas if that's your thing, I think they're vile and would never encourage anyone to use them, but it's your casserole. Have fun with it.