Broccoli and Cheese Casserole Recipe

Hi! I am Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen! Tonight, we’re having a very simple broccoli and cheese casserole. You might be able to hear my water boiling back here. I am going to be cooking some broccoli in hot water. What I have here is a frozen broccoli florets. I think for a casserole, those are the nicest because those are the parts that are most flavorful and don’t have hard stems that you have to worry about. So, I am going to use part of this bag. This bag is 14 oz. We need about 10 oz. If you bough a box of frozen vegetables in the freezer section at your supermarket, it probably would be 10 oz. So, I am going to go by that. So, I am just going to estimate 10 oz. out of 14; that would be about 2/3 of this. So, we need some rapidly boiling water, about an inch or so in here and then heat, pour this in and of course it immediately will stop boiling because this is frozen. And it’s cooling that water down a lot. That looks good. So, I am just going to bring that back at to a bowl and I will be cooking it six to eight minutes. So, I am going to go away and get started a little bit on our topping that goes with this casserole and we’ll let this cook. These broccoli florets has been cooking about five minutes and they’re at a point where they are, crisp, tender and I don’t really want them completely done because I am going to be baking them in a casserole in the oven. So, I am going to remove them from the heat. I am going to use a colander to pour off the water and stop cooking right there. And we want to put these back in the pot where they were. So, put that right at the water. And it is really important that you, to drain them pretty well of water because we’re going to be adding some cheese to this. I mean I want that water down. But again, it is going back in the oven and it does break up a lot of liquid. Now, our topping which will come after we add the cheese is composed of ½ stick of melted margarine. I already got that going for us and then I have some Ritz crackers I will show you what I did with them. I took one of the air containers out. You know, they come like this. So, I took one dose m a whole one. You don’t have to use that much. You don’t have to put anywhere near the amount that I have. I just like them as a topping a lot. And you don’t have to butter them if you don’t want to but you do need to break them up a bit. Now, you do not have to be broken up in a little of a coating that you might put on meat and bake that like a coating for chicken or a coating for stake or something. You can have big chunks like this but the way this got in this form was I took a rolling pin and just mashed down on them until they got the point where I thought that looks good. So, we’re going to put those in the margarine. And we don’t really have to cook them because we’re going to bake this in the oven. This just needs to get mixed in to get that nice top. I prefer to use margarine here instead of butter because butter has a tendency to burn much more rapidly than margarine. And I didn’t want to take that risk although, if you prefer butter, that’s fine. So, you just spread this around and you may use all of these or as I’ve said, you don’t need to make this much if you don’t want to use this much or if you’ve made this much and changed your mind, you want to use this for something else, part of it for something else. You could use half of it. It would be fine. But it’s ready and we’re ready with that casserole. So, back over here, I happen to have ½ jar, this is a 16 oz. jar of Cheez Whiz. We’ve made a casserole last week, I think the Hash Brown Casserole which was really good. And we used half of this. So, I had it in my refrigerator and I don’t like to let things go to waste, so I was trying to think, well I can use that on and also needed a vegetable tonight. So, that’s a simple broccoli casserole. So, now that we have our hot broccoli there and I have brought this out off the refrigerator and put it in the microwave for about 30 seconds because it was pretty stiff and I wanted to be able to stir it in and not have too much trouble getting it to combine. So, just bring out 8 oz. worth of Cheez Whiz. And that way, you won’t have to worry about shredding cheese or getting shredded cheese. It’s just already a sauce. We can make this the sauce with the butter and flour and milk and all of that. Just use Cheez Whiz, spread this around, get it all coated. Once it gets coated, now it looks pretty thick. But remember, the broccoli is somewhat watery. And the two will combine in such a way that this will be about the right amount for us. So, this looks nice. And we’re going to put it in a dish that I have prepared. Right here is a casserole dish that isn’t very large because we don’t have a lot here. I sprayed it already with cooking spray, canola oil spray. And what I want to do with this is pour this little broccoli casserole into my small casserole dish. This is a really nice way of using up some things that you have in the refrigerator after you’ve made some kind of recipe that you use maybe half of it and then you have the other half. Just try to think of something that might be totally unrelated that uses the same ingredient. When you get that spread around a bit, then you’re ready to bring your topping over. And just put as much or little as you want. So, I am just going to sprinkle this out and when it looks right, that can all stop. When it looks very ponderable and like it’s not overdoing it, yet it’s not being zingy with it either. And I am getting mainly the smaller ones but as I said, when you mash that with a rolling pin, you don’t want it to be fine like corn meal. You want it chunky to an extent that I really prefer it not to have huge chunks in it. So, this is about the way you want it to look. It’s ready to go in a 350° oven. So, I have my oven preheated. I am going to put it in. It won’t take long for this to be ready because it’s pretty much cooked already and it just needs to brown off that top and have some bubbly cheese sauce and it will look great. So, I will be back to show you the end result in a few minutes. All right, this cheese casserole is done. I’ve been watching it here. It has taken 15 minutes for it to come to this point. And to see what’s it’s supposed to look when it’s done is it’s supposed to be nice and lovely around all the edges and the topping which is the Ritz cracker in margarine has browned up a bit. It’s going to be nice and crispy. So, let’s bring that out of the oven. Turn the oven off. And see what it looks like when it’s served. Yeah, this is a very small casserole of this because as I’ve said, it’s just me and my husband. And we needed some kind of vegetable tonight and this just fit available because I was needing to use up some Cheez Whiz as well. But you might want to double the recipe or if you want to use the whole package of broccoli and the whole jar, it doesn’t have to be a perfect proportion to what I used. It will come out looking something like this, unless you do something extremely different. And with regard to the topping, it’s just whatever you want. So, when we dig into this. It’s going to be a nice, juicy casserole that was so simple to make. And it’s going to be very tasty because that Cheez Whiz is a very good flavor to add in with broccoli and that topping being all crispy like it is. It’s just going to top it off. So, let’s take a bite here and see how it came out. I got a lot of cheese and a little bit of broccoli, very good.