Making Memories In the Kitchen - Green Bean & Hot Dog Casserole
Holidays for me are about reliving memories created in the kitchen, cooking with my mother.
My mother was the casserole queen. Growing up in the ’70s, one-pan dishes were mostly what I thought of as dinner. And boy, were a lot of them … creative. The immediacy and efficacy of a casserole is not lost on me. Cooking a starch, vegetable, and protein (that’s what went into most of mom’s casseroles) in one dish makes a lot of sense.
But for years I wondered why someone who loved food almost as much as I did, and grew up cooking from scratch would, well, “stoop” to such shortcuts? As an adult now, looking back on my mother and her own childhood, it’s easy to understand.
My mother was born in June of 1945, just as WWII was winding down. After years of uncertainty and sacrifice, there was a sense of hope and change. And while things were starting to get a little easier for homemakers with industrial efforts now allowed to refocus their attention on the consumer rather than the war effort, my mother and her family didn’t experience much of that. She grew up poor on a farm, and in addition to working the fields with her brothers, she and her sisters were also responsible for the household chores and the cooking.
Perhaps she would have felt differently about it if everyone else was struggling to make ends meet, but I remember her telling me how ashamed she felt about her clothes, her hairstyle, and the fact that they just didn’t have expendable money to spend on appliances and ingredients that made work easier in the kitchen.
Out on her own and newly married in the late ‘60s, she made up for lost time by buying canned vegetables and pre-packaged bread and cake mixes. By the time she’d had the three of us and had gone back to work, popping a one-dish casserole in the oven at 6:00 p.m. just made sense.
I will not fault my mother for being lured away from scratch cooking to the convenience of a casserole, but I drew the line at a canned green bean and hot dog dish I referred to as Egg-erroneous.
If you’ve ever seen Ernest Goes to Camp you’ll recall that the Laurel and Hardy-like camp chef characters were always looking for shortcuts to get food out quickly to the large groups of ungrateful campers. After purchasing some whiz-bang gadget that they loaded up with raw ingredients, they flipped a few switches and turned a few dials, expecting the contraption to bring forth amazing cuisine. What was emitted forcefully instead, were huge globs of nasty, mucusy-looking blobs of yuck that they coined “eggs-erroneous”. For me, this casserole made up of a béchamel (I swear it was just condensed cream of mushroom soup but my sister says I’m wrong), canned green beans, hot dogs and topped with corn flakes and cheddar cheese, was a monstrosity that I wasn’t about to let near my stomach.
As an experienced eater who was anything but picky growing up, it was painful for me to turn my nose up at a dish that everyone in my family adored. I usually settled on cereal as they spooned the goopy green beans and hot dogs into their grinning mouths. They weren’t phased in the least by my refusal to partake and even started calling it egg-erroneous themselves.
When my mother passed away in 2012, I made it a point to gather up all of her cookbooks and recipes penned on notecards. Growing up in the kitchen with my mother fostered my love of cooking and more than anything, I wanted to make sure the foods that made her happiest lived on in my kitchen.
Yep, there are a lot of casserole dishes, but there are other recipes: her fried chicken, chicken noodle soup (with scratch noodles), her Christmas cookies, Mexican rice, her Navajo Taco recipe … lots of dishes that won out occasionally over the casserole when she had spare time to indulge me.
Not long after her passing, I started getting phone calls from my brother, sister, and even my father, asking if I knew how to make one of their favorite dishes “the way mom used to make it,” and I’d gratefully pass those recipes along to them. But one day my brother called and asked for the recipe for Eggs-Erroneous. I told him, “You realize that’s not what the recipe was really called, right? That was just what I called it.”
“Right, but do you think you can find it?” He pleaded.
I finally found it in an old church pot-luck cookbook. I think it’s called something mundane like “Green Bean & Hot Dog Casserole”. Eggs-erroneous sounds so much better. The original recipe does call for making a bechamel, but I swear Mom even short-cutted that and used cream of mushroom soup.
Fast forward all these years and I’m living with my sister now on her farm in central Washington. My brother and his girlfriend have also moved up to Washington and this is the first Christmas we’ve all spent together since my mom died. I thought it would be fun if we did an Eggs-erroneous cookoff: my sister would do mom’s original version, and I’d do an over-hauled remake of the dish, updating it with ingredients that would entice me to eat it.
Before we tasted them, I told my brother and sister that I knew mom’s original casserole would win, because of the nostalgia surrounding it. They loved it, I made a huge deal of hating it, and the good times we had laughing about it are what makes the dish so memorable.
We sampled both casseroles and all three of us decided it was a tie. Mom’s won for nostalgia, and mine won for more modern flavor.
I’m including both recipes here as a tribute to the love we shared in the past in our kitchens, and for all the great food memories yet to be made. Merry Christmas.
Mom’s Original Green Bean & Hot Dog Casserole
(aka - Eggs-Erroneous)
-
½ stick butter (4 T.)
¼ cup AP flour
4 cups whole milk
Salt and pepper to taste
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
2 cans green beans, drained
8 hot dogs
1 -2 cups corn flakes cereal
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
-
Preheat your oven to 350°. Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium heat until melted. Add the flour and whisk to combine, cooking for several minutes until the flour takes on a toasted golden color. Add the milk all at once, season with 1 t. salt and ½ t. freshly cracked pepper, and add the Worcestershire sauce. Bring to a bubble and cook gently until the béchamel thickens. Taste and season with more salt, pepper, and Worcestershire if desired.
While the sauce is thickening, slice the hotdogs crosswise into 1-inch pieces. Bring a medium pot of water to boil and cook the hot dogs in the boiling water for about five minutes. Drain and add to the béchamel sauce in the skillet. Add the two drained cans of green beans to the sauce and heat through.
Assemble the casserole: Pour the green beans, hot dogs, and béchamel sauce into a 9X13-inch casserole dish. Top with the corn flakes and cheddar cheese. Bake for 40 minutes until bubbly.
Heidi’s Modern Green Bean, Andouille Sausage, Mushroom, and Roasted Garlic Casserole
-
2 Tbsp. mashed, roasted garlic (recipe below)
½ stick butter (4 T.) + 2 T.
¼ cup AP flour
4 cups whole milk
Salt and pepper to taste
Freshly ground nutmeg
1lb fresh green beans, trimmed and halved
3 T. olive oil, divided
1/2lb andouille sausage, sliced ½-inch on the bias
8oz fresh mushrooms, quartered
2 cups panko breadcrumbs
1 cup shredded gruyere cheese
-
Preheat the oven to 350°. Preheat your oven to 350°. Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium heat until melted. Add the roasted garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add the flour and whisk to combine, cooking for several minutes until the flour takes on a toasted golden color. Add the milk all at once, season with 1 t. salt and ½ t. freshly cracked pepper. Bring to a bubble and cook gently until the béchamel thickens. Taste and season with more salt, pepper if desired.
While the sauce is cooking, bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt heavily with kosher salt (I like to take two big handfuls of salt and toss them into the pot). Add the green beans and cook for five minutes. Drain the beans and set them aside. If you want to be all chefy, you could shock the cooked beans in ice water, but you’re putting them into a casserole, so it’s not super important that they retain that vibrant green flavor. Totally up to you.
Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Add the sliced andouille sausage and cook to your desired crispiness. The andouille is already cooked, you’re just heating the sausage through and getting a bit of char on them. Set the sausage aside. Add 1 tablespoon of oil to the skillet and add the mushrooms. Let the mushrooms sit undisturbed for a few minutes before shaking the pan so they caramelize. Toss the mushrooms periodically until they begin to soften and color, then finish by seasoning them with a sprinkling of kosher alt. Remove the mushrooms from the skillet. Heat the last tablespoon of oil in the skillet and add the blanched green beans. Cook until the beans begin to char. Remove the green beans and add them, along with the andouille sausage and the mushrooms to the béchamel sauce.
Wipe down the cast-iron skillet and add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat. Once melted, add the panko and stir to incorporate. Gently toss and toast the panko until it begins to turn golden, then remove from the heat.
Assemble: Pour the green beans, sausage, mushrooms, and béchamel sauce into a 9X13-inch casserole dish. Top with the toasted panko bread crumbs and gruyere cheese. Bake for 30 minutes until bubbly.
-
1 head garlic
Olive oil
Preheat your oven to 425°. Break the head of garlic into individual cloves but do not peel them. Place the cloves on a sheet of aluminum foil. Drizzle with olive oil and wrap the cloves up in a little package. Roast in the oven for 15-20 minutes until the garlic is soft and slips easily out of their little jackets. Leave the cloves whole or mash them to make a lovely roasted garlic paste. Drizzle with more olive oil and store in the refrigerator.
