Cooking Through My Meal Plan of Cozy Casseroles

Hi there, welcome to my channel. I'm Jennifer. This is A Country Life and in today's video I'm going to be sharing with you guys five cozy comfort casseroles. So let's get started with the first one. It's homemade in the sense that I make it at home in my oven but it's barely homemade. It's so simple but it's very satisfying. We are going to be making scallop potatoes with ham. This is a very fast and easy way to do it. Of course there's the homemade, like 100% homemade way you can do it. These are very inexpensive at Aldi and I also picked up the ham there. They have the Never Any Sliced Smoked Ham. That's my favorite. Yes Maria, you can grab some ham. And I'm just going to get this chopped up. We're going to get everything into the casserole dish and pop it into the oven. I do not use boiling water, just just kind of hot tap water. And if quick and easy from a box mix isn't your thing, stick around because there will be more homemade style casseroles coming up. Whoa, okay, that wasn't supposed to happen. All right, we're going to put the ham on top. And the most important thing with this is just make sure that the potatoes are all submerged under the water milk mixture. I just did three tablespoons butter instead of four tablespoons butter. It's two per box but since I have the ham in there and I'm going to be putting cheese in here as well, that is enough of kind of like that buttery fat that you need to kind of, oh, just make all the flavors taste so good. I'll get some cheese in here. And this is a variety of cheeses. I have some cheddar, some mozzarella, and some Colby Jack. I had just shredded a bunch of cheese up the other day, like all the little packages that were left in the fridge. I shredded them all up for another supper and we didn't use all of it. So I have some of this left and I don't know, that was maybe a half a cup to a cup. Let's put a little bit more. And I will put this in the oven now. Let me just consult the box quick. Without the add-ins, it would go at 450 for 25 minutes. Actually, what I'm going to do is put this in at 425. I'm going to leave it in longer. It's probably going to be in for about, I'm going to say around 35 to 40 minutes. I just watch it, just kind of eyeball it, guys. I will stir it once early on, just because I don't want the cheese to get too brown. But I'm going to leave it just like this and then, oh, in about 20 minutes or so, I'm going to stir, stir it, and then I'll just leave it undisturbed for the last, oh, half an hour or whatever it happens to be. It's going to be less than that. I just added that up right in my head. That's actually like 55 minutes. I don't think it's going to have to much more than 45. I've made this lots of times before. Sometimes I put it in a 9x13 casserole, which is a little bit bigger and more shallow. Sometimes I put it in this. Whatever I put it in kind of determines how long it's going to have to bake. I'm not even preheating my oven. I'm just popping it in there and we're going to call it good. This is very forgiving. The scalloped potatoes and ham is very, very bubbly. I had it in, you know, I put it in cold to a cold oven. It was about a few minutes after it preheated. That's when I opened it up and stirred it and then I set the timer for 30 more minutes and there's actually two minutes left on the timer, but I want to run down and talk to Warren and see what time he's coming in for supper. It needs a little time to set up and to cool just a bit and then it'll be ready to serve. Doesn't that look delicious? For tonight's supper, we are going to be having hot dish with ground meat, which is the worst name for, I think, a recipe ever. Anyway, this is one of my grandma's recipes and it's just something I remember eating, well, when I was, you know, growing up and everything and it's something that I actually really, really like. Some people, I think, call these porcupine meatballs. Anyway, we are going to start by getting out the meat for tomorrow night's supper, which I'm going to need a whole chicken and some potatoes and then some carrots. All right, I need a half a cup of uncooked rice and I remember my grandma using minute rice, so that's what I'm using, and then the hamburger. So since I just have ground beef today, that's what I'm using. I would normally use ground venison with this recipe. It's absolutely delicious and it calls for one pound, but I have mine in one and a half pound tubes, so that's what I'm going to use. And that's good because we like the meat portion of this better, probably, than the rest of it. We're going to put some pepper in here, quite a bit, and I'm going to do a whole teaspoon of salt. And we're just going to roll these into some pretty good sized meatballs. And if you're kind of thinking about your family size, I definitely want to make 15 meatballs. We're six people tonight. I want everyone to be able to have, you know, two to three. It looks like I'm going to get 16. This last one's going to be a little big. All right, in go the potatoes and carrots. It calls for one can of green beans. I don't have any pints. I'm going to drain most, well, I'm going to drain some of this liquid out and put about half of this jar of green beans in because it's okay if you have some of the juice from the green beans. All right, the last thing we need is one can of tomato soup and then we need one soup can full of water. I'm going to stir that together and then we're going to pour all of that over the hot dish here. If you don't want the tomato base, you can use cream of mushroom soup. You could also probably use, I haven't ever done it, but you could also use like cream of celery. I actually think that would be really, really good. I still mix it with one soup can of water. This is going to go into the oven at 350 degrees for an hour and 30 minutes. It looks like tater tot casserole without the tater tots. A little bit. I guess I could kind of see that. So everything is all finished up. I did take the lid off for about the last 20-30 minutes of cooking time. Wow, Joe, right over the chips, huh? Nice. Joe, you must be hungry tonight. Good morning. Today's cozy casserole is going to be chicken spaghetti. I'm going to use the recipe from the Pioneer Woman. I believe it's from her very, very first cookbook. I have made the chicken spaghetti recipe also from, oh my gosh, Magnolia Table. I believe that's in her first cookbook as well. And I don't remember. I don't know. I'm going to make this one. I didn't even compare the ingredients to see if they're the same or different, but this is what we're going to do. So I have a whole chicken here, whole chicken, and I'm going to get that into my stock pot and then I'm going to cover it with enough water. Well, I'm going to put water in to cover it. There is a little bit of ice, but it's going to be fine. I'm going to bring this to a boil and then I'm going to simmer it until I lift up a leg and it falls off. That's how long we're going to simmer it. It could be 40 minutes. It could be less. It could be more. All right, we need a venison roast for tomorrow night, so I'm going to get that out right now. One and a half. We're going to go with this two and three quarters right down there. Do you guys see that one? Right down there. That's the one we're going to go for. Let's pull on this wing. Nope, that's definitely not done. Set timer for 20 minutes. Another 20 minutes. It's getting close. Still not, though. Okay, I really want... I know those are the wings. Come on, turn over. Let's grab this leg. Oh, the leg is getting close, but it needs to go longer. We're going to go another 20. All right, what do you think? Is it... Oh, look it. It's waving at me with its little wing here. Okay, that fell right off. That is falling off. I feel like I want it to be just a little bit... Oh, it's coming off pretty good. Let's see what happens when I pick up the carcass. Oh, it falls apart. Look at that. Okay, this is done just how I want it. I'm just going bring the chicken out to cool enough to be able to pull all of this off the bone. Two-tong job here. Okay, there we go. Hot. Okay, the liquid drains down. Look at that. Okay, what else do we have in here? Yeah, that smells good, doesn't it? And then I need two cups of the broth here set aside. Okay, let's bring this back to a boil. I only need one pound of the spaghetti here, so let's just put this on the scale and we will take spaghetti out. I'm going to break this kind of like in half and in half again, or maybe thirds, just so it's smaller pieces. All right, we're going to get just a small chunk of onion diced up rather than pimento. Since I don't have that, I am just going to use a little bit of an orange pepper here. I'm going to get this diced really tiny. All right, just sharpen my knife. That's so much better. I'm going to do the same exact thing with a little tiny bit of green pepper. Into this enormous bowl here, I'm going to add the spaghetti. I'm going to pour in two cans of cream of mushroom soup, and I'm also going to get some shredded cheese, or get some cheese shredded. Two cups, and I'm going to mix that in as well. So at this point, I need two cups of shredded cheddar cheese. I have, this is probably three quarters of a cup right here, and then I have another cup of mozzarella. I'm going to use that, and then for the top, when I need to put a little bit more on top, I'm going to shred up some of this Colby here. I need a teaspoon of seasoned salt, and pepper to taste. I like a lot of pepper. Uh, no. Yes, lots of pepper. And then just a sprinkling of cayenne, just to give it a little bit of heat. I feel like that's just a sprinkling. Good size sprinkling. You thought that was a good size sprinkle? Yeah. So we're going to get all of this mixed up. I still have to get the chicken off the bone. This casserole definitely takes some time. This is not like, it's four o'clock and we need something for 5 30. I mean, this takes some time. So it's actually before lunch still. I've been working on this on and off while we've been doing school work this morning, and it's kind of that type of casserole. You can get the chicken going, and just kind of keep attending to it. So anyway, that's kind of the point with this, is that you can, you want to make this early enough in the day. This is a lot of chicken, so I'm going to stop at that point. I'm going to pick the rest of this. There's breast meat here, there's a wing on the other side still, and the neck. So anything here, I'm going to actually make for, I'm going to keep it for something else. I'm going to put it in the fridge. I might just make some quick chicken salad just to have a little bit on hand, whatever, but not right now. I am going to run my spring-loaded kitchen shears through the meat here. There's some really big chunks. When I was pulling it apart, some were pretty darn big. We're just going to kind of chop some of that. I realized before, I never did put in that mozzarella cheese, so there's that. I have the reserved two cups of broth. I'm going to add that in now and get this stirred up. I did have to put this in the refrigerator for the afternoon because we were gone at homeschool co-op. I am going to just loosely cover this like this in the oven, and it says it should go in for 35 to 40 minutes. I think it's going to have to go a little longer simply because it was in the refrigerator. If I would have been able to make it and put it straight into the fridge, those noodles were still kind of warm, the chicken was still warm, but I refrigerated it, so it's colder. So I think it's going to have to go for 45 minutes, maybe even 50, and Warren won't be in for an hour anyway, so I'm just going to cover it loosely like this just so that that cheese doesn't get too brown. And this is a 10 by 15 pyrex casserole dish, so it is a big one, and it is, I would say, it's quite full. Good morning. Lots of cranberry fall-like baking going on here today. I am making a cranberry bundt cake. I'm getting it going here early this morning because I want to have it out of the oven, cooled, and ready for everyone to have at lunch if they want to have a piece. I have one of my homemade cake mixes. I still have them. I haven't used any since I made the first one. It was kind of a dry cake, and I just hadn't attempted it. Yes, Peter? He's telling me from outside it's 25 degrees. Yes it is 25 degrees and cold. So anyway, let's go out and grab some cranberries. We got a bunch in here yesterday. Oops, I need to bring my bowl. I could use frozen cranberries because I have them. Tons and tons and tons of frozen cranberries. I should say hundreds and hundreds of pounds of frozen cranberries, but I'm just going to grab some fresh ones because we just brought those in to dry last night. I have a couple of people coming to pick up cranberries today. One lady is getting 50 pounds, another one is getting 5 pounds. So let's get that. I'm going to have to pick through these. There might be a couple of bad ones in here. Okay, I did pick through these yesterday, last night, and a little bit earlier this morning also. This one is soft. There's a leaf. All right, we'll pick through those as we pour them in too. If you like to follow along, this is on page 51 in volume 2. I believe it's in the desserts section. So here's what we need to do. We need to put our cake mix in here. We need a pack of instant vanilla pudding. Bring my garbage out. I haven't said that in a while, but when I'm baking, cooking, whatever, I like to keep my garbage close by so that I can keep my workspace fairly clean. I'm going to go for the largest eggs that I have here in this dozen. It's four eggs. Grab one of my half-used paper towels or napkin from the cupboard. I'm also going to turn on the oven to 350. We need a half a cup of oil. This comes together so fast. I will check the moisture of this and maybe add a little milk if I think that's necessary. This is kind of like in between. It's not a cookie dough batter or cookie dough consistency. It's wetter than that, but I am going to add just a bit of water to this. About a fourth of a cup. That looks better. It kind of falls before it didn't even fall off. That looks better. All right, let's get the cranberries in. You can cut the cranberries if you want. You can cut them in half. I'm not going to do that. I need two cups of cranberries. When I'm baking with fresh cranberries, I will use a soft cranberry, but I will not use them if they have like this kind of brown brownish red to them. That's just too soft for me, but if it's just a tiny bit soft, I will use it. We're also going to put some walnuts in. You can put about three-fourths cup. Walnuts, pecans, no nuts, really however you'd like to do it. No, just grease it. I have a bundt pan here. We're going to get this very well greased. All right, there we go. This is going to go into a 350 degree oven for definitely 50 minutes. It may even have to go a little bit longer. I'll keep you posted. Whoa! What was that all about? Nothing. I'm going to make some peanut butter balls. This is on page 69 of cookbook two. We're going to start with four tablespoons of peanut butter, four tablespoons of butter. I'm going to get that stirred together. It takes a little bit to mix the peanut butter and butter together if it's cold in the house. Four tablespoons of corn syrup, and then last it's going to be a teaspoon of vanilla. I shouldn't say last, but next is going to be a teaspoon of vanilla. You need two tablespoons of milk. I've just been stirring this, and we're going to put in one cup of powdered sugar. All right, that was just two and a fourth cups of the crushed. I'm going to roll these in balls, and I do have extra crumbs, which is a good thing. So yeah, save a few crumbs out, because after you roll these in balls, then you're going to roll them into more crumbs. So I'll show you the cake. It's out of the oven, and it's cooled. I actually had to go and run an errand. If I didn't have to do that, I would have taken it out a little bit sooner out of the bundt pan, and it probably wouldn't have stuck, but you know what? When it sticks, you've got that, like, those little bits in the pan that you can eat. And yes, I am still basically doing low carb, but every once in a while, you make a cake, and you just want to have a little bite. I think it looks worse through the camera than it actually looks in person. I'm going to put a little bit of a frosting glaze over this, and I'm pretty sure if a person wants to try a piece of this cake, they're not going to mind that there's a few spots where it kind of tore out. Look at it. From that angle, you can't even tell. We are on our very last day of cranberry harvest. Probably one or two trailers, semi trailers of cranberries are left out there still to be harvested today, and it's 10 o'clock, which means they're probably only down to the very last few cranberries. Okay, am I excited about that? Yes, I am. And does that mean that Warren can start getting some sleep? Yes. And does that mean that everybody in the house will start being maybe not so sleep deprived? That's a nice way of saying kind of grumpy, crabby. That's what happens when you're sleep deprived. We are going to be having our harvest party tonight, and that is for everybody who worked and their families, and we just provide a meal and maybe some games or some fun or just just chatting. Just kind of relaxing and being excited and happy that the crop is in, and it's a way for us to thank them for all of their hard work. This year, it was when we added all up, it was three and a half weeks, and they, was it three and a half? A little bit over actually, a little over three and a half weeks they take out of their life to dedicate to helping us get our harvest in, and we appreciate that very, very much. I am making a brand new recipe to share with the crew tonight. Maria is cleaning the garage. Yes, I would say that should go on dad's workbench. Maybe just make a pile of things you think go on the workbench. And I wish I wrote in this cookbook who sent this to me. She had sent such a nice letter, and I know I have the letter, but anyway, I wish I would have written in here, but maybe Washington or Oregon or Canada, somewhere over in that area, I think. Okay, so she had sent me this cookbook here, and I am going to make this brand new recipe out of it today. It's called Cranberry Poppy Seed Loaf, and you can put a glaze over the top. Once it's cooled, you can bet I will be doing that. Anyone else? Is this what the inside of your cupboard looks like? Full of, let's see, what do I have in here? Pictures of my grandma and my grandpa. My taco seasoning recipe, so that when I have to refill the jar, it's right there. I don't have to look anywhere. A little valentine note that Warren wrote to me. I don't even know when. And then, well, I don't need this anymore. These are some casserole dishes that I used to have, and I had measured out what sizes they were. Two, two and a half cups all-purpose flour, three-fourths cup of sugar, two tablespoons of poppy seeds, one tablespoon baking powder. Where did it come from? Garage. All right, throw it in the laundry. Third of a cup of butter, melted. And then I need two teaspoons of lemon peel, but I don't have lemon, so I'm just going to use orange. Cranberry and orange go together very well. I guess until you feel like you've got a couple teaspoons. One egg, one teaspoon of vanilla, a cup of milk. Stir that in. Yep, there's two boxes. And I'm just mixing this until it's just moistened, it says. I'm also going to get my oven turned to 350 degrees. This looks pretty thick, and let's see what else I have to do. And then I need to stir in the cranberries, so it's just one cup of cranberries. You know I'm going to do more. We're actually going to go with all of those. And all of those. There's three pairs of hip waders, but if they don't need to be there, I kind of want to put them in the basement. Set them by the basement door. And because I like to, this recipe calls for an eight and a half by four and a half by two and a half inch loaf pan. I'm going to use two of these smaller loaf pans. I usually will link to something very, very close to these in the description. These are seven and three eighths by three and five eighths by two and one fourth. These pans were my mom's. I have four of them. There are pictures of me when I was like three with these pans. So these have been around for a long, long time. You guys, that's like nearly 50 years. And I, she may have had them even longer. So anyway, I will link to something as close as I can in Amazon. I love these loaf pans. They're bigger than those like little mini ones that I have that I'll give as gifts a lot of times. Those were in one of your coat pockets. As with most quick breads, I do think that they're actually better the next day. We're going to eat this tonight. That's just how it's going to be. This is going to go in for, it says 60 to 70 minutes. These are two smaller pans. So I think that these are going to only go in for probably, I'm going to say 50 minutes probably, but I will check them at 45. Yeah, that's garbage on each. Yeah, for sure. It is done. Record crop is in. It is done. I just have to deliver the last trailer and finally. That was a long pull, but we got it. Got it in. Warren just came in and said that there's a motor, hydraulic motor on the cleaner. As we were putting the last of the fruit in, it just started dripping hydraulic oil, which means it needs a new seal kit. I mean, it broke the other day, but they were able to fix it, like fix it up enough to work. The bread was in for 47 minutes. I had it set for 50, but 47 was perfectly good. I put it in there and look at that. It's nice and clean. I'm going to let this cool. Let's turn off that timer. I'm going to let these cool for about 10 minutes. Let's just slide this in here quick and then we'll turn those out to cool. They'll have plenty of time because it's only 11 o'clock right now. They have plenty of time to cool before our five o'clock supper. Maria just made the glaze. This was one cup of powdered sugar and you ended up with a full tablespoon of milk. Three teaspoons plus, okay, so about a full tablespoon, maybe a little over, and then a smidge of vanilla extract. That was enough to glaze both of these. We're going to get these sliced up to see how they are. Tonight's casserole is one that has to be in the oven for about an hour and a half, so I'm very quickly trying to get this into the oven by 415. Let me show you what I have going here. Tonight's casserole is German casserole, brand new, never made this before. It is from this sort of like cookbook, magazine, I guess you could kind of call it, fix it and forget it, from 2013. I have one and a half pounds of hamburger. It only meat calls for one pound, but you know mine are one and a half pound packs, so that's what I use. I got a little frozen section right there, so I just need to get that to kind of thaw and get this browned up, and then I'm going to put in some onion and a little bit of orange pepper. The recipe calls for green pepper. I didn't have any. I had a tiny bit of orange pepper left from the other day, so that's what I'm using. I also need sauerkraut and rice. I need tomato sauce. I may go down and get my home canned tomato sauce if I don't have an eight ounce can in here, down to the basement. I also need some beef broth. I'm just going to use a beef bouillon cube mixed with some water. Into this casserole dish I'm going to put an entire can, juice and all, of sauerkraut. I used warm water for the broth here, so that my bouillon cube would dissolve quicker. All right, we're going to add the water with the bouillon. We need a half cup of rice. There's not really any grease to drain. We're going to mix this all around, making sure that all of the rice is pushed down into the liquid. You don't want any hard rice. I only need eight ounces of tomato sauce. We're going to spread that over the top, and then we need a good amount of pepper, and then a quarter teaspoon of pepper. We'll cover this, bake it at 350 for one hour. I'm going to take the cover off and bake it another 30 minutes. And I made it. Actually, I'm four minutes early. German casserole is out of the oven, and I said, boy, this one's going to be a doozy tonight, guys. I actually took it out four minutes early, because doesn't it look like it's getting over baked? Let me get a spoon. I have to say, I don't really think this is looking very good. We will see, though. Oh, I thought maybe it was overcooking, but it actually is not. I thought maybe it was kind of getting too burnt or something around the edge, but it isn't. But it looks like it'll be served up like this, so you'll get a little bit of that tomato sauce with it. Earlier in the morning, I wanted to make rustic mini loaves to go with this, because I thought a good chunky piece of bread with this and then some kind of vegetable or something along with it would be really good. But guess what? I never got the bread done. We were doing school work, and I just never could get to the bread machine, so that's off the table for tonight. But we do have this, and I am going to warm up. I have some cauliflower from last night, which I will eat. Nobody else is going to. And then I also have some green beans, so I'll warm that up, and we'll just do our normal. I'll probably go down and grab some pickles, and we have applesauce, and we have cranberry sauce. I think my family's getting a little sick of those three things, but it's just something that we have. I haven't gone to the grocery store actually in quite a while, other than yesterday, to grab three gallons of milk at the quick trip. So yeah, anyway, let's get this served up and see how this one is. Tonight's cozy casserole is going to be venison stew, and it's going to go into my dutch oven and into the oven for a few hours. So I need to get this going into the oven so I can then get to the grocery store. I have a venison roast here. I'm going to cube this up. Maria is working on the carrots. That's perfect. Once you have those done, Maria, if you could do some potatoes. You want me to do the carrots? Saturday. Oh, okay. Do you know what kind of outing? No. Okay. It doesn't know times yet. Okay. I use this oven venison stew recipe as really just kind of a guideline, and I do oftentimes change it up quite a bit. I have a lot more venison than two cups. I have more potatoes. I probably only have two cups of carrots, and then I use a whole onion, at least today I am, and I have a couple of ribs of celery along with some of the tops, the celery tops as well. I like that extra concentrated flavor that's in the celery leaves. Four teaspoons of tapioca. I go light on the brown sugar quite often. I don't mind it with a three tablespoons, but most of my family prefers it with a lot less brown sugar, so just one loosely packed scoop of brown sugar, one tablespoon. I put in the whole amount, one and a half teaspoons of salt. Venison can take a lot of salt, and then I'm doing 12 ounces of my home canned tomato juice, and then I put in one beef bouillon cube along with about a half a cup of water. Now I'm just going to put this into a 350 degree oven. I am covering this. It's going to go for probably about three hours, and at about maybe one hour, and then at two hours, I'll give it a stir just to make sure that everything is having a chance to be under all of the broth and get all nice and juicy. I didn't want to leave you guys all hanging as far as what our impressions were of all of the cozy casseroles, so I do have Warren here tonight. It's getting late on Friday night. We don't really feel like being on camera, but anyway, these are the five cozy casseroles that we had. We started out with scallop, potatoes, and ham, hot dish with ground meat, chicken spaghetti, German casserole, and oven-baked venison stew, and I am going to quickly put these in order as to how I think I would probably rate these. Oh, this is actually kind of hard. The hot dish with ground meat, was that? That's the one with the meatballs. It has the rice in the meatballs. It's in the casserole with the carrots, potatoes, green beans. You know what I'm talking about? The one that I say tastes like my grandma and grandpa, or at least tastes like being at their house. This is hard. That's my order right there. I'm going to say this. In my reasoning, hot dish with ground meat, like I keep saying, reminds me of grandma and grandpa's house. Scallop, potatoes, and ham. It's easy to make, and everybody eats it. I like it a lot, and I might like other ones a little bit even more than that, but I love that everybody will actually eat that one. Chicken spaghetti, I just love that kind of thing with a little bit of pepper and onion. Oven-baked venison stew, that was very good. This one looked horrible, but tasted pretty good. It did taste all right. We have a little leftovers that will get eaten. Joe gobbled this one up super fast. I was surprised by that, so I'd love to know your order. Okay, my order is a little different. We're putting scallop tails at the top, and I think that's still in the view, and then we are doing the stew for number two. I knew you would do that. And then we're going to do the hot dish with ground meat, chicken spaghetti, and the German casserole. They were all good, but that is my list. Yeah, that's your order. You know, it's funny. I kind of thought you'd put it low, although this was another, I don't know if I could say favorite of the kids. This is the only one that Maria likes right here, although she likes the meat. The kids liked this one a lot. Except Maria wasn't a fan of that one. Well, yeah. But Joe liked every single one of them. Like I said, I didn't want to leave you hanging, and so there were our impressions of the cozy casseroles. We'll see you guys in the next video. Thanks for watching. Bye.