holiday edition: green bean casserole

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. It’s been a while – I got a little busy. Had to move this blog, a couple big projects at work, got married, you know, just this and that.

Anyhow in honor of the holiday today, I wanted to share with you what is going on in our kitchen, namely

Green Bean Casserole

Now, for all intents and purposes, this is the Pioneer Woman’s Green Bean Casserole, which as she notes is not your grandma’s green bean casserole. I think the world of Ree and this casserole will knock your socks off. Reasons why it’s amazing:

• It starts with a roux instead of cream of mushroom soup
• Lots of cheese
• Blanched, fresh, green beans which are still full of garden-y life when you eat them rather than the despair-filled canned kind. Sorry, I have feelings about that kind.
• Finally – BACON

So why am I bothering to write about it, if you can just click over to her recipe? Well, Robert and I have a few tweaks that we think make it even more delicious so I thought I’d share.

First, a word of advice. You can put this casserole together more or less all at once, but it has three distinct stages and thus three separate pans. I like holidays to feel a bit lazy and often we have the luxury of just bringing a dish or two to the family meal, rather than being ground central – so we don’t have to be firing on all cylinders in our kitchen. If that’s the case, may I advise: do all of your mise en place (a Frenchified way of saying your chop-and-prep); then do your beans, set them aside; then your bacon; and that way you can give your full attention, and arm strength, to your roux when the time comes.  Also, we find this fits just about perfectly into a 9 x 13 baking dish.

Secondly, we know that panko bread crumbs are probably healthier and lighter and they give a nice texture but we confess, we love french fried onions. So we still use those – a whole standard size tin full – and we even put a small handful or two in with the casserole part, so they’re throughout the dish.

Finally, my husband is from South Carolina so this household simply cannot recognize any other kind of pimiento than the diced pimiento. Those are what we use. We love them, we stand by them, that’s how we roll.

So there you have it! Green bean casserole. Seriously, try it. I don’t even like green bean casserole and I love this stuff so much we’ve now made it three major holidays in a row PLUS for a birthday celebration.