I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Av’s mom put me in charge of the pies and two other dishes, so I decided to make a couple of casseroles.
I love green bean casserole, but rather than doing the usual recipe that has cream of mushroom soup and those weird canned fried onions on top, I tried to do it a little more home-made…and it turned out *so* wonderful! From now on, I’m calling this *the* green bean casserole!
Ingredients (serves 12-14):
1-1/2 sticks butter
2 white or yellow onions diced
1 white or yellow onion sliced very thinly (for onion rings)
16 oz. button mushrooms, sliced into 4-5 pieces each
8 tbsp flour
4 cups hot milk
2 28oz cans green beans (I should have blanched fresh beans but I was lazy!)
12 oz. freshly grated parmesan cheese
oil for making onion rings
flour for dredging onion rings
salt, pepper
10.5″ x 14.75″ baking dish
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.
First, cook the two diced onions in 1/4 stick of butter, then when they are softened, add the mushrooms and cook until heated through:
In a very large saucepan, whisk together the butter and the hot milk along with the flour. Once that’s nice and smooth, add the green beans along with the onion/mushroom mixture. Season with salt and ground pepper.
Take half the contents of the saucepan and pour into a baking dish. Add half the freshly grated parmesan:
…then pour the rest of the saucepan’s contents into the baking dish, and cover with the remaining parmesan.
Be careful when putting it in the oven, because it is really-really heavy. Set the baking dish in the oven and cook for about 20 minutes – it will be nice and bubbly. While it’s baking, make the onion rings. Take the sliced onion and dredge the rings into flour, then place in a hot oiled skillet and fry until done (these are nice if they are super-thin). Season these when they first come out of the pan.
Once the casserole has cooked for 20 minutes, layer the onion rings on top and it’s all done!
