Green Bean And Chayote Squash Casserole With Fried Onion Strings

Recipe: Green Bean Chayote Squash Casserole with Fried Onion Strings

Welcome back ladies and gents!  This week's meal is one your blogger recent tried and wanted to share. It's a surprisingly rich dish,  while also being full of vegetables. This recipe is based on the one from The Texas Cowboy Kitchen by Grady Spears and June Naylor. This book is absolutely amazing. It's full of stunning photos and history on top of delicious recipes. 

There is one ingredient we don't expect everyone to be experienced with, and that's the chayote squash.  Check down in the notes for an explanation of what that is and how to prepare it. 

Ingredients

1 pound fresh green beans, ends trimmed

½ pound chayote squash, peeled, seeded and julienned strips need to be roughly the size of your green beans in both length and diameter. 

3 Tbsp Butter

2 Tbsp vegetable oil 

1 pound bacon, diced

1 cup diced red onion

1/3 cup unsalted butter

1/3 cup all purpose flour

1 3/4 cups heavy cream

1 2/3 cups grated asiago cheese

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

-Prepare the vegetables by blanching the green beans and chayote in a large pot of water for 5 minutes. Set them to the side in a colander after you've let them fully cool in the ice bath. 

-Meanwhile , butter a shallow 4 quart casserole or a 13 by 9 by 2 inch glass baking pan with butter and set aside. 

-Preheat your oven to 350*F . 

-Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the bacon, stirring as necessary to separate the pieces so they cook evenly. Drain the grease as it accumulates so the bacon won’t be swimming in grease.  -You won't need the grease later, so feel free to dispose of it.  

-When the bacon is half cooked, add the onion and continue to cook, stirring occasionally , until the bacon is done and the onion is soft. 

-Allow to cool  before you transfer to the buttered casserole dish. Set the mixture aside. 

-In a separate pan, heat the unsalted butter over medium heat until melted, but not bubbling. 

-Whisk the flour into the butter to create a roux, stirring constantly. Cook for several minutes until the roux becomes fragrant but does not brown. 

-Add the cream slowly but whisk steadily to prevent lumps. 

-Turn down the heat so that the sauce is simmering, not boiling, add salt and pepper and cook for about 5 minutes or until thickened. Put the green beans and chayote squash into the casserole dish and cover with white sauce. 

-Top with the grated cheese and place it in oven to bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the mixture is bubbling. 

-Remove the casserole from the oven and top with the warm, crispy, fried onion strings. 

-Serve immediately. 

Notes: 

Chayote squash - The chayote squash can also be found under the name  the mirliton squash. Originally a Mesoamerican plant, the chayote squash is handled like a summer squash. While the fruit is what we use in this recipe, the  root, stem, seeds and leaves are all edible as well. The fruit is roughly pear shaped, growing between 10 to 20 cm long. It looks like a green pear, has flattened sections, coarse wrinkles, and green to white flesh. The flesh of the fruit is fairly bland and tastes like a cross between a potato and a cucumber. It's.. curious but still tasty.   

Blanching - Blanching is a pretty basic technique, but it's still really important to know. It can be done to preserve the color and texture of vegetables, to prep them well ahead of when you need to cook a meal or to prepare vegetables for freezing.  

What you'll need:  

A large bowl of  water 1/3 full of ice

A large slotted spoon

A large pot of water

-Bring your water to a boil over high heat . 

-Chop your vegetables so that they're uniform in size. This ensures even cooking and cooling. 

-In small batches add the vegetables to the water. Doing it this way keeps the water at a boil. Make sure that you don't  cover the pot with a lid.  

-After 30 seconds remove one piece and dip it into the ice bath, then taste for doneness. Repeat this stop every 30-60 seconds until the vegetable is cooked to your preference. Most vegetables will take between 2-5 minutes. 

-When the vegetables are done, quickly turn off the heat and using the slotted spoon transfer them to the ice bath to stop the cooking process. 

-When the vegetables are completely cool, remove them from the ice bath and  let them drain on paper towels. 

Crispy Fried Onions-  A quick and easy recipe for these is here. They turned out amazing and tasted so good on top of the casserole.  Just look at how amazing they look in the photo that Miss In The Kitchen did! They are absolutely drool-worthy.

Thank you very much for joining us this week! We hope you enjoy this post as much as we did, and please share your photos over on Facebook!  We'd love to see how your dishes turn out. 

If your stove isn't working right, or any of your appliances, please reach out to us.   We want to help keep your home running in tip top shape. You can click here to schedule an appointment or you can call us at  214-599-0055. We care about our clients in Carrolton and all of the surrounding areas.

Recipe modified from the one in The Texas Cowboy Kitchen. All rights belong to Grady Spears and June Naylor 

Go buy the book at Barnes & Noble, it’s most certainly worth it.

Lucky New Year's Black-Eyed Peas

Although we’re a bit late to eat this on New Year’s Day, we wanted to start something new for weekends and share a recipe.

In my family on New Year's Eve, we make this dish in order to have good luck in the coming year. Also, because it’s a family tradition that goes back several generations. It goes by many different names, although to my brothers and me, it was just black-eyed peas. 

It’s not entirely clear how far back the dish itself dates, although one of the more interesting ideas is that it goes back to the Civil War. 

“One of two popular explanations for the South’s association with peas and good luck dates back to the American Civil War. The first is associated with General William T. Sherman’s march of the Union Army to the sea, during which they pillaged the Confederates' food supplies. Stories say peas and salted pork were said to have been left untouched, because of the belief that they were animal food unfit for human consumption. Southerners considered themselves lucky to be left with some supplies to help them survive the winter, and black-eyed peas evolved into a representation of good luck.”

Well, need is the mother of innovation, and from it came this delicious dish. 

Ingredients:  

3 Tablespoons butter

3 stalks of celery, chopped 

1 small green bell pepper, chopped

1 medium yellow onion, chopped 

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 ham hock, rinsed and patted dry 

2 cups ham, cooked and cubed 

2 cups frozen black-eyed peas OR 2 cups canned black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained 

2 cups cooked white rice

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper 

½ teaspoon salt 

Hot sauce to taste

Instructions: 

1. Start by thoroughly rinsing your beans if you’re using canned ones. You don’t need the added salt when you have both the cubed ham and the ham hock. 

2. Bring a large pot to the stove and turn it to medium heat. Melt your butter and then add bell pepper, onion, celery, and garlic. Stir regularly and cook till the vegetables are very tender. Roughly 7-10 minutes. 

3. Add in your ham hock and the cubed ham. Pour enough water to cover the top of the hock and ring to a boil, uncovered. Keeping it uncovered, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes. 

4. Stir in rice, and black-eyed peas, leaving it to simmer for another 15 minutes. 

5. Season it with hot sauce to taste. (We keep our hot sauce on the counter so that everyone can add as much as they like. I know our little one doesn’t add any!) 

Tips: 

• If you can’t get a ham hock at your local store, you can go with just a ham bone and a rasher of bacon.

• You can also make the dish a little more flavorful by cooking the rice in the liquid before adding in your beans. This gives it more time to absorb the flavors of the mix. Don’t add the beans for a longer cook time, though, as they’ll end up too soft. 

• If you use frozen black-eyed peas, don’t worry about defrosting them before-hand. You can toss them into the pot straight out of the freezer. 

• IF however, you opt to use dried peas, please make sure that you soak them overnight and then rinse them once more with cold water before adding them to the cooking pot. 

A well-cared-for kitchen is needed in order to make any recipe. If you’re seeing issues with any of your appliances, consider making an appointment. Or you can check out our post from earlier this week if you’re looking to buy something new. We’d love to help you continue making memories and delicious foods with your family. Call us today for fast and reliable service.  

Tell us below in the comments or over on Facebook, have you tried black-eyed peas before? Love them? Hate them? Have an entirely different recipe for them? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

Adapted From: Paula Deen's ­South­ern ­Cook­ing Bible, I think. I’ll admit that when I asked my grandmother where she got this recipe, she just pointed me towards a giant collection of cookbooks. On one hand, I grew up thinking that the recipe had been handed down for generations through our family. On the other hand, she said that she’d modified the recipe after reading it somewhere else.

Looking for this recipe was not easy. This is the closest to the recipe as I grew up making it, but it’s not precise. There’s also the fact that Paula Deen calls the dish Hoppin’ John. So, who knows?

Credit for the background image for this post goes to Jud McCranie.