Winter Casserole – Steve’s Dead-Easy Cooking

All right – so you’ve blown all of your grocery money on eggnog and stocking stuffers and you’re wondering just what you can do about supper tonight – WONDER NO LONGER!

Let me share with you my recipe for Winter Casserole.

It’s dead easy.

First off, grab yourself a big old roasting pan.

You know – something like this!

You can also use a casserole dish or a big old pot or ANYTHING that will hold a lot of yummy crunchy vegetable goodness and is oven-ready.

I usually start with a couple of onions – because EVERYTHING that is worth cooking usually starts with a couple of big fat onions. Then I grab a cabbage and a bag of carrots. You can also throw in a turnip or some squash or some sweet potato if you’d like. Whatever you’ve got in the fridge – or, if you don’t own a fridge whatever you can pick up at the local grocery store. Think cheap and filling.

Chop it up and layer it into the casserole dish.

Note – I also like to chop up a big fat chunk of smoked sausage – preferably the gooey kind with cheese in the middle – but this dish can easily be made as a vegetarian dish without the sausage.

Once you’ve got it all layered into the roasting pan – (and by layered I mean grab a handful of onion and drop it into the pan. Then a handle of cabbage and a handful of potato and a handful of sausage and keep on handfulling until the pan begins to brim up) then dump in a big box of stock – (I use chicken but vegetable stock is just as yummy and lower in calories) – and shake on some pepper and then slide the pan into the oven.

How hot should the oven be?

That depends on how long you want to cook it.

I usually wind up setting the oven to 350 and let it cook for an hour and a half – but you can also set it at about 200 and let it sit and simmer in the oven for a few hours. Remember – this is nothing but vegetables and (maybe) smoked sausage and stock – ALL ready to eat. So the cooking is just to help blend the flavors.

Cover the pan. Go and watch a movie or read a book or stand by the kitchen window and look serene.

Your family comes home in an hour or two and the entire house is going to smell so heavenly I bet you they set the table with out even being asked. You don’t have a table – hell, they’ll build you one out of two-by-fours and chewing gum.

Serve it with a good chewy beer and grin knowingly when they asked you how long it took to get ready.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon