I’m not talking about the condensed-soup, or from-the-box kind, I’m talkin’ real-deal, home-made, from scratch, healthy, one-dish, hot meals.

My casserole adventure began with a batch of homemade carrot soup that I added too much cayenne pepper to, it was just too hot to eat straight-up, so I decided to use it as an ingredient in something else, a casserole! So I looked at a bunch of different casserole recipes and discovered several common factors:

1. Thick soup was somehow involved.

2. There was a starch element (potatoes, rice, etc)

3. There were other ingredients, such as vegetables and meat.

4. There was some sort of topping, like cheese or crumbs.

5. Everything got cooked before it all got mixed together and put in the oven.

So I cooked up a mixture of wild and white rice in the rice cooker, sauteed some chicken and vegetables, then mixed it all up, grated cheese on top, and threw it in the oven on a low temperature. The low temperature was my only mistake, it needed a much higher temperature to actually get the heat all the way through that thick mass of food. I kept pulling it out and checking it, frustrated with its failure to heat up quickly. 45 minutes later I turned up the temperature, walked away for 20 minutes, and came back to happily discover a bubbling, steaming casserole! Perfect!

My second attempt (there was a LOT of that soup to use up) wasn’t nearly as good as the first, too many extra carrots added in (the soup really was enough carrotness for one dish), but I am interested in trying again with another creamy, homemade soup.

So there is a bit of insight into how Shannon cooks. Very intuitively, very independently, very experimentally, with a lot of reckless abandon, know very well that in the end, I will eat pretty much anything, so no matter how bad it is, at least I won’t go hungry, and at least I will have learned something new.