Keep a weakness for casserole alive with an ingredient upgrade
Locating solid sources for all grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef got me hankering for a scratch-made casserole, one without artificial ingredients, chemicals with difficult-to-pronounce names or pasta from wheat sprayed at the end of its growth-cycle with herbicide.
Many years ago most of my casseroles started with an inexpensive "on-sale" box of Hamburger Helper. Of course, I added my own touches, like frozen baby peas and sliced black olives.
You may respond as incredulously as my partner, Nan, did when she opened my pantry for the first time seven years ago and said: "I don't believe it, you're a healthy food writer and you have boxes of Hamburger Helper in your pantry.
I shared with her what I've shared with you; Hamburger Helper was a guilty pleasure of mine. Seven years later my current pantry has none of that.
My casserole hankering reminded me that my first cookbook: "Lean and Lovin' It" had a South-of-the-Border Casserole recipe about which I'd nearly forgotten.
The original higher-fat (from sausage and sour cream) and the higher-calorie recipe came from Craig Claiborne's "New York Times Cookbook," and he called it, simply, Mexican Pasta Casserole.
I bought that cookbook in 1990, two years before I began writing this column, when I had the tremendous opportunity to meet Claiborne when he signed his, and soon to be my, book in Northbrook. At that time, I had just lost more than 100 pounds.
Claiborne's recipe was a new idea for me since the pasta was added uncooked to the pan. The pasta cooked by absorbing the liquid from his casserole's ingredients, which made a simple and flavorful one-pan dinner.
Claiborne's spicy recipe (chili powder and jalapeño peppers contributed heat) also used sugar to smooth out the acidity in the canned tomatoes and some the bite from the jalapeños.
Claiborne would have hated what I had done to his casserole. I substituted 95-percent lean ground beef for the flavor-packed pork sausage he used. Back then, in my kitchen, nonfat sour cream stood in for high-in-fat "real" sour cream. Nonfat sour cream barely had any flavor, and its one benefit: trimming calories and fat also trimmed the tastiness that "real" sour cream contributed.
Did I trim the fat and calories from Claiborne's casserole back then? You betcha. My "improved" casserole cut 100 calories and nearly 15 fat grams per serving. Significant trimming.
This time, all grass-fed, grass-finished 85/15 ground beef bumped up the casserole's flavor profile significantly. And now I use "real," organic sour cream. The only thing I didn't do was use sugar (2 tablespoons); instead, substituted organic stevia to round out the flavor profile without adding calories.
The one pan convenience of Claiborne's recipe also produced gummy results from the pasta throwing off its carbohydrates into the sauce. This time I cooked the pasta in a separate pan and left those sticky carbs in that pan's water.
How did my nearly authentic Claiborne casserole turn out? Well, two guests went back for seconds, and all plates were clean at dinner's end.
The price for all that wonderfulness? An extra 100 calories which come from the healthier ground beef and "real" sour cream.
The only thing about which I'm sorry: I can't tell Craig what a terrific recipe he created.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@ theleanwizard.com.