Chicken 'n Stuffing: or, Canned soup with food interspersions

I think this might be what Midwesterners call a "hotdish"?

Chicken-and-Stuffing 2 chicken breasts, cooked and cubed or 2½ cups cubed leftover chicken 1 can cream of mushroom soup (or cream of celery, or whatever cream-of-something you like) ¼ cup milk ¼ cup chicken broth       Topping: 1½ cups seasoned stuffing mix or croutons ½ cup chicken broth 4 tablespoons butter, melted Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 1½ quart casserole dish. Mix all ingredients, place in casserole. Then mix together the topping ingredients and sprinkle on top. Cover casserole with foil and bake 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake 20 minutes more. Use and Care Book for Deluxe Toaster Oven/Broil, Proctor-Silex, 1970s-ish

I accidentally cooked more chicken than I needed for dinner. Ordinarily I would have frozen the surplus for twenty years, but the summer heat has mostly gone away and it's oven season again! Today we're trying this random recipe from a toaster oven manual.

Use and Care Book for Deluxe Toaster Oven/Broil, Proctor-Silex, 1970s-ish

One of my friends found an old instruction manual and asked me to scan it that it may be uploaded to the internet. This is what happens when other people think color-correcting is a mysterious art. But I can't complain because these are the people who do a lot of freebie repairs for me. 

At any rate, this manual is an accidental 1970s time capsule. The illustrators even took the time to draw the vinyl simulated woodgrain on the sides. 

At any rate, I thought this casserole looked pretty good when I saw it. I thought it'd be a one-dish meal until I looked closely at the ingredients. This is basically canned chicken soup if you were to add your own chicken.  But sometimes a gloppy casserole is exactly what you need, even if you have to come up with a vegetable to serve next to it.

The recipe starts with a little bit of stuffing mix. Unfortunately, you can't buy small packages of that. After a bit of consideration, I decided that stuffing mix is usually a feedsack full of croutons. The substitution was obvious, and also meant I could eat the rest of the box of croutons.

 

Next, we get to the canned soup! The recipe calls for cream of mushroom, but I argue that cream of celery is a superior casserole glue. Ours kind of held the shape of the can as it glorped into the bowl, like a half-pecked-at gelatin mold that is drooping at the end of a luncheon.

In less time than I thought, we were ready to bake our big beige mess.

 

This wasn't so much a casserole as I understand it but a very thick soup with bread on top. Think onion soup gratinee if it came out of a factory. I wouldn't have minded the goopiness if this had been any good, but...

This tastes like a recipe from when everyone smoked. But mostly, it wasn't very good. I like canned soup as a casserole binder, but it tastes bland and slightly metallic on its own. Whether you use cream of mushroom or cream of celery, you have to really like the taste of barely-altered canned soup if you make this. 

But I'll give credit where it'd due: our chicken was neither bland or dry. If you're trying to figure out what to do with that dry chicken that you feel guilty about, this recipe could be what you're looking for.

For the record, I think the Canadian version of this idea was better. But this one barely involved any more work than just throwing things into a pan.