Runza Casserole: Put it all in one pan and you're done

Today, we are making runza casserole!

Runza Casserole 2 pounds ground beef 2 onions, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onions) 4 cups finely shredded cabbage Salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste (I added garlic powder and a lot of paprika) 2 tubes refrigerated crescent rolls (or one large batch of biscuit dough) 1 pound mozzerella cheese, shredded (I used cheddar instead) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Brown beef and onion in a large pot. Drain. Reduce heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the cabbage on top of the meat. Put the lid on the pot and let it cook without peeking for about eight minutes. Then stir in the salt and seasonings. While the cabbage is steaming, spread one tube of crescent roll pieces over bottom of the pan. Press to close seams. Put the meat and cabbage over the rolls. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then unroll the second tube of crescent rolls and lay them on top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with foil for the last 10 minutes (this softens the top crust). Note: If you cut this in half, it fits nicely in an oven-safe skillet. Irene Biederstedt (McLaughlin, South Dakota); KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

I love the picture on the front cover. It looks like a snapshot from the Thanksgiving office potluck. Also, that light looks like a late-1980s spaceship.

KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

As I understand it, runzas are yeast rolls stuffed with meat and cabbage. They look like something that originally was a complete meal in an edible handheld package. Today, we're simplifying the process by putting everything into one big pan.

Speaking of simplifying things (or at least trying to), we are shredding today's cheese the modern way! I already planned to electrically shred the cabbage, so I thought I might try to do the same with the cheese. 

One pound of cheese may seem a lot for one casserole. But if you read the ingredients, we're using a lot of everything. If you make this recipe in full quantity, it will feed a whole family, any friends have wandered in, and anyone looking for leftovers the next day.

I have to admit, I like the electric cabbage shredder more than I thought it would. Fussing with all those food processor attachments seemed pointless the first time-- especially when I had to clean every one of them. But sometimes I just want to make dinner without any knife skills. And even though this adds a lot more dishes to the pileup in the sink, sometimes it's nice to get dinner ready faster. 

Back to the casserole, we didn't manage to shred the cheese on the first attempt. (A copy of the food processor instruction manual would have been nice.) Instead, I put all the accessory pieces together wrong and squished the cheese.

After some trial and error, we were soon shredding cheese at an astonishing rate. If I'd gotten this right the first time, it would have been twice as fast as using a normal grater. Instead, I think I delayed dinner by at least ten minutes.

Next, we got to why I had the food processor out: the cabbage. This seemed like one of those recipes where you want the cabbage in very fine slivers, which I can't do by hand (though I'm better than I was). Also I just wasn't in the mood for a lot of hand-slicing.

Are we using equal amounts of cabbage and cheese?

Now that we were done spending time trying to save time, it was time to get to the meat of the recipe. I forget where I read this (I think it was on Tumblr), but someone said "Half of all 'good family recipes' start with 'cream the butter and sugar,' and the other half start with 'brown the beef and onions.'" Naturally, we used frozen onions so I didn't have to chop them myself.

We are next directed to put the cabbage on top and let it steam for a bit. This strained our skillet's capacity, but we managed to get everything crammed in there and put foil on top. I really hoped the cabbage would shrink in the steam.

 

We are supposed to use canned crescent rolls for the top and bottom of this casserole. I used homemade biscuit dough because I forgot to get the cans.

Speaking of canned bread, I was going to write that if you halve the recipe, you can purchase two canned pizza crusts and fit it in a cast-iron skillet. Then I stopped by the canned biscuit section and checked the prices. Two cans of crescent rolls would have cost more than the beef! I'm not a snob (though I get how it can seem like that sometimes), but canned biscuits are absolutely not that good.   

Shopping aside, we were now ready to assemble. I accidentally made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Had I followed the directions, it would have been a simple matter of lining a 9x13 pan with bread dough and then tipping the skillet into it. Instead, we had to empty the pan long enough to put bread in the bottom first. So remember: even if a recipe is only ten sentences long, be sure to read the whole thing!

The recipe's final line of instruction confused me: "Cover with foil the last 10 minutes to soften the crust." I figured this would make sense when the time came. Ten minutes before the time was up, the top crust had hardened to a big cracker. Even though I didn't think anything could fix it, I put our runza casserole under a foil tent to finish out the baking time. The crust turned back into soft bread, which again proves that you should always read the recipe.

This was a lot better than I thought. It hit the same satisfying spot as the meatball-mushroom pie. It's hard to go wrong when your recipe starts with a pound of beef, a lot of onions, and bread on top. 

It's a really nice meal-in-one-pan for when you want meat, vegetables, and no fuss (assuming you don't find canned biscuits too expensive). When I was making this, I thought it might need more vegetables in it. But I think it had the perfect meat-to-cabbage ratio. It's simple, but satisfying. And if you remember to get canned biscuits and don't mind the expense, it's pretty fast to put together, too. 

It was a lot better when I halved the filling to match my half-size pan, though.