Tinfoil Chef

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Not long ago my wife found a recipe, Layered Beef and Potato Casserole on Lisa Cooking that really looked great. After a lot of time meaning to do something with it, I recently took a shot at making it. What follows is the sad tale of how a good recipe ended up turning out, um… passable.

I’ll start here by saying that if I’d made it according to the original directions it very likely would have turned out fine. However, partly because some ingredients weren’t available and partly because I wanted to double the recipe, I just had to tinker with it a bit. For example I used a 14 x 10 x 2 baking dish instead of the 12 x 8 originally called for.

The first substitution I made was to use ground turkey instead of ground beef. The main reason for this is that because of the cost of beef these days we don’t have it around very much, plus we like the fact that turkey is so much more “grease free”. So I ended up using 2lbs of ground turkey.

The only frozen mixed vegetables we could find at the time was a stir-fry mix that included broccoli florets and baby corn.

The frozen potatoes O’Brian with peppers and onions weren’t available so I used some frozen hash browns that I mixed up with some sauteed onions and green peppers. That part did pretty good except that doubling the potatoes made for way too much.

I got the 2lbs of ground turkey browned and crumbled, added the four cups of mixed vegetables and the two 12 oz jars of gravy and a teaspoon of salt. This was allowed to cook until thoroughly heated and the veggies were thawed.

Then I sprayed the baking dish and put in a layer of potatoes (six cups) and then put in the turkey & veggie mixture and a layer of cheese. I topped it with the remaining six cups of potatoes.

This took about an hour and twenty minutes or so to cook through after which I topped it with shredded cheese and put it back in to melt the cheese.

The result smelled great but there was a decided excess of potatoes. Next time I try this one there’s going to be a lot less potato involved. I’ll probably also add more gravy as what was used got soaked up by the potatoes.

This didn’t exactly turn out “bad”, because I’m still eating leftovers of it and more has been frozen for later but It could have turned out a lot better. Next time I’m certain it will.

Technorati Tags: casserole, unsuccessful, double, potato, recipe

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