A Tale of Two Casseroles or Why We’re Never Having a Vegan Over Again

So now that our place has been a little cleaner as of late, we decided to try our hand at entertaining guests last night. Three brave (and genuinely classy) ladyfriends of ours voluntarily subjected themselves to our well-meaning hospitalites, against their better judgement I can only imagine. Ben was planning on making a chicken casserole from a family recipe. Problem: one of them is a vegetarian/semi-vegan and all of us are raging meat-etarians. We had no idea what to make for her, until about 2 hours before they were supposed to come over. That was when, out of sheer desperation (and, in retrospect, a good deal of hubris), Ben decided we would attempt to improvise a vegetarian chicken casserole on the fly in addition to the regular casserole. How hard could it be? Substitute tofu for chicken, and cream of broccoli soup for cream of chicken, and all the other ingredients stay the same, right down to the… stuffing. Wait… where’s the stuffing? And that’s when I was sent on an emergency grocery run to pick up the stuffing which Ben had forgotten. At the store, things got even trickier. Every single kind of stuffing contained some variant of chicken fat, chicken broth, or just ambigous chicken flavor. Decidedly un-vegetarian. Being stuffingless for the vegetarian casserole and rapidly running out of time we decided to improvise yet again. Advice for the reader: if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, please be advised that crumbled toast and seasoned shake and bake breading boiled with water and butter will not approximate stuffing. It will be some form of doughy muck that bears no resemblence whatsoever to stuffing. However, being in a similar situation it will be your only option and you will have to go ahead and use it anyway, hoping that it will miraculously come out alright when you bake the casserole. This also will not be the case. Our net result was one fairly normal looking chicken casserole and one pile of tofu, noodles, soup, and sour cream in a casserole dish, with a doughy bread pudding spread sporadically on top. But you know, all casseroles just look gross so what’s the difference really? Being the only person to sample both casseroles I can safely say that the difference is the taste. Our vegetarian friend had several servings and she said that it was pretty good, but trust me, she was just being kind. We’re sorry. We really are. That’s all I can say. You know what though? I got to wear my bitchin’ new cowboy vest to dinner, so I’d declare the night a success no matter what.

Comments

Comment by Ben Lewis on 2004-09-01 21:02:06 +0000

I had totally forgot about this one. I was laughing hard for the whole duration I read it. A classic Clarington Court moment