Chicken Veggie Casserole

Personal Observations: This tastes like potpie! No crust needed! Easy & inexpensive, I make this one often.

Gidget's Rating: 5 stars

Sausage Tomato Hashbrown Casserole

Personal Observations: One of my favorites! I have yet to figure out how best to get the tomato flavor into the whole dish. The original recipe called for cherry tomatoes, but those are rather pricey so I substituted sliced tomatoes. I'm considering using diced tomotoes next time and mixing it into the dish rather than layering it on top...*ponders* We'll see.



Gidget's Rating: 5 stars

Hearty Chicken Casserole

Personal Observations: This was a tasty dish. It's more labor intensive than I would have liked as it took a LONG time to get the sauce to thicken (might be attributed to my saucepans though). I liked it enough to keep the recipe but don't know how often I'll make it!

Gidget's Rating: 4 stars

Tex-Mex Chicken Soup

Personal Observations: This is really good! I did eliminate a few ingredients (i.e. icky split peas) and substituted tortilla chips for the home-broiled tortilla strips (my attempt resulted in blackened blobs). Consequently the nutritional analysis is slightly inaccurate.

Gidget's Rating: 5 stars

Easy Feta Chicken Bake

Personal Observations: I added sliced bell peppers to the dish before baking and it was all delicious! Each bite is a piece of heaven. Yumm!

Gidget's Rating: 5 stars

Cheese-Topped Beef Bake

Personal Observations: Not all pasta is equal. This is an important lesson. I couldn't find medium shell pasta at my local grocery store, so I substituted a tube pasta no realizing that the resulting quantity of pasta could fill two of those 13x9x2 baking dishes. That's a lot of pasta.... So, be careful when substituting. Otherwise this was pretty tasty -- more fat than I want to know about, but tasty.

Gidget's Rating: 4 stars

Moroccan Chickpea Chili

Personal Observations: This is really good! I'm the first to shy away from cinnamon in my main dishes but I followed directions on this one and it turned out fabulous! It's even better warmed up! The only doctoring I did was add butter, as with ham & bean soup. Perfect!

Gidget's Rating: 5 stars

Cajun Meatloaf

Personal Observations: I've had this one for a long time but never tried it out. So, when I was searching for something to make with ingredients I had on hand, this was the only dish that qualified. I was leery but it isn't too bad. I learned that using too lean of a beef makes for a very dry meatloaf so I'll have to use a fattier beef next time. Also, it needs some cheese!

Gidget's Rating: 4 stars

Ground Beef Potpie

Personal Observations: This still needs some tweaking. I used a box of instant mashed potatoe flakes as a substitute for the mashed potatoes and increased the beef broth to a full can (14 oz?). It turned out okay although it was rather...thick. :) I also need to buy some marjoram! Also, I think we can dispense with the pie pastry sheet since it tastes funny when it's not homemade. I didn't really add much to the dish anyway and the potatoes & carrot are enough carbs to balance the protein.

Gidget's Rating: 4 stars