Chicken Rice Casserole Recipe

Chicken Rice Casserole Recipe Cook on Sunday, eat until Thursday. I'm Allie and you're watching Economy Bites. So today we’re going to be making an all-American classic Midwestern style casserole with chicken and rice, mushrooms and bacon. So I found this recipe—actually somebody sent it to me, a loyal reader. I was sorry I could have said a loyal watcher. I flexed with it a little bit. I just added a couple of things that I like and I think it’s really good. It passed the boyfriend test which means he ate a lot of it. It’s a nice, real like 1960s style family meal when people still ate together which we’re now bringing back— I've got — should be family values. So the first thing I'm going to do is set my oven to 375. I have already washed my hands. So this is a pound and a half of boneless, skinless chicken breast. What I'm going to do is cube it, just cutting it into slices here, about this size, see? Like a scallop. Now I'm just going to rinse this off to make sure we don’t get any E. Coli, E Coli death. I don’t know what’s wrong with E. Coli but I know it’s bad. Okay, so this is just sliced regular old bacon. Let’s say eight slices of bacon and what I'm going to do is dice this into small pieces and I'm going to crumble it on top my casserole. This is like maybe half an inch so I'm taking my bacon, set them to the side. So now I have a medium size yellow sweet onion. Now I'm going to dice this pretty small. You really need to film yourself having iced tea. Look empty and I think you're going to take mushrooms. Now this is eight ounces of Crimini mushrooms. And now we’re going to chop these up just so there’s small kind of bite size. Do you remember the big chicken on Animaniacs? They’re going to get their own bowl because we’re not going to cook them at the same time. I'm just going to chop up two cloves of garlic. It’s got curves, real garlic has curves. I like putting it in right with the onion. I like to put it in a couple of minutes later so that it doesn’t burn, beautiful. Okay. So now we’re going to start the first cooking step of the meal and I'm going to sauté the chicken in batches, just a couple of pieces at a time so that they all get to cook evenly. I'm going to ready another plate for the cooked pieces. You know, actually, I'm not going to keep this here because the last time I did this when I picked it up it was really hot and I burned my fingers so I'm learning from my past burning. And all we’re looking to do is brown them on each side. Put some salt on them so when we flip it and then put it on the paper, we want to let the oil drain away. So now, I'm just going to give my flip. It’s kind of hard to maneuver this size. Definitely, do not touch it with your hands. Okay. So these pieces have cooked about a minute or two on both sides. For my last batch, I'm just going to add a little bit more. We’re just getting it brown. We’re going to set the chicken aside. Now I'm going to take my onions. Okay. So now it’s about medium heat. I'm just going to add my onions. Just going to give them a couple of minutes, nice and soft. Now we’re going to add the garlic and cook for another minute or so. Okay. So these smell nice and cooked so I'm going to remove them here back to once they came. We’re going to cook our mushrooms. When they cook, they’ll get wet and they like release their own water. Salt them pretty heavily through no power of meal, through the power of their own. They’re now wet, mushroom have amazing powers. I'm going to add them to our onion. Put some oil in that pan and let it get hot. And now we’re going to cook some bacon. [Foreign Language]. We’re going to break up the clumps. This is bacon taste good. B-A-C-O-N-ess bacon. It takes you know around five to six or seven minutes. I'm pouring out some of this oil because I think there is too much. Okay, but this looks nice and cooked to me so I'm just going to remove it here. So now what we’re going to do is take a fourth of cup of this chicken stock that we bought at the grocery store. We’re going to deglaze this pan that we’re going to pick up the juicy, fatty bits from the bottom. Pour in that in here, picking up this bit. Okay. So while that’s reducing, we’re going to pour ourselves another cup and a third. And when this has reduced down to like a tablespoon, we’re going to add our cup and a third and we’re going to add from the fridge fourth cup of heavy cream, half a cup of this our reduced fat sour cream and now we’re just stirring that around. Give it some salt and a little bit of black pepper. Let’s stir and taste. That’s good. And we’re going to add a cup of rice. Now this is long grain white rice. That’s what I would suggest to use. I’ve never made this recipe with brown rice and then just mix all that stuff together. And now we’re going to add a generous handful of Italian seasoning. Add a couple shakes of paprika. And now we’re going to pour this into our casserole dish. I'm going to take my little pieces of chicken from earlier and I'm just going to start placing them on top there and one for the cat. Carefully pour our sauce all over. You know the rice is going to soak it up. I'm going to take our bacon crumbles up and around. It kind of seems to me a little bit like a holiday recipe. The sauce is good. Now I'm going to take it and pop it in the oven for 45 minutes. Alright, let’s take this - out of the oven. Oh my God in heaven, I'm going to let it sit for a couple of minutes for a cut into it just to make sure that it like solidify. So if you eat this with a like a little salad or maybe some broccoli or some asparagus, you have a really good, well-balanced meal. You got your meat. You got your rice and you got your vegetable. Those are the three things that mom told you not to forget to eat when you when out and started eating on your own. It is delicious. And this is like a casserole that has a lot of depth so this will definitely last I would say five to six days. And in total, we spent only $26.00. So depending on your grocery store and where you live, this meal that last you about six days would cost only $25.00 to $30.00 which would mean only between five to six dollars per meal which is really good. That’s less than you would spend. That’s like half a large pizza from Domino’s which is not nearly as good, not nearly as accomplished as this chicken and rice casserole. Cook on Sunday, eat until Thursday, I'm Allie and I’ll see you next week.