Chicken Noodle Casserole

We experimented with a casserole dish on Wednesday and now have a new favorite meal.  I was craving something like tuna casserole (which is obviously out of the question for us) and was getting extremely frustrated as I was searching for chicken noodle casserole recipes ‘from scratch.’  I was especially disappointed in an “Amish” recipe that called for multiple types of Campbell’s condensed soup.  However, I did find one recipe that pointed me in the right direction.  We took the recipe from All Recipes and tweaked it a bit to match our needs.  And just for reference, the lettuce in the picture was picked a few minutes before eating and the flower is a nasturtium.

Ingredients

-8 oz. package of egg noodles (we got ours at Rife’s, they are not completely local but they are quite close)

-1/2 medium onion, finely chopped

-Garlic powder or 1 clove garlic, minced

-1/4 cup all purpose flour (again not local but since Jacob moved in we have had some on hand)

-2 cups milk

-Salt and pepper to taste (I also added a bit of Lawry’s seasoning salt from our stash)

-3 chicken breasts cut into bite sized pieces

-1 cup frozen or fresh peas

-1/2 cup butter

-Shredded Cheddar Cheese

Instructions

-Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

-Cook the chicken pieces until they are cooked all the way through, then add the garlic, onion, and if you are using fresh peas, add those now too.  If you use frozen peas, just make sure they are thawed before you mix them in the casserole dish later on.

-While the chicken is cooking, cook up your egg noodles, drain them, and set them aside.

-To make the casserole sauce, melt 4 tbs. of butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour.  Gradually add the milk and continue cooking 5 minutes until sauce is smooth and slightly thickened.  Season with salt and pepper.

-Combine the noodles, meat mix, and sauce into a medium sized baking dish.  Top with freshly grated cheddar cheese.

-Bake 25 minutes or until bubbly and light brown.

I highly recommend eating this with a fresh salad.  In our household, we like to mix our lettuce with our food to give it a little crunch, so we picked fresh spinach and lettuces from the backyard just before eating.  We also mixed in some local cucumber, kohlrabi, and sugar snap peas to spice it up. 

I’m used to my first attempts at recipes to be a little less than great, oftentimes they are somewhat bland, but Jacob and I both took our first bites, looked at each other with big grins, and (once we swallowed) couldn’t help but exclaim how delicious this dish was!