Hi, I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we’re going to do a Fillet Beef Casserole. The idea is to make it taste like a Fillet Steak Sandwich. We’re going to put those cans of ingredients in but it’s going to turn out in casserole form and I think you’ll like it.

Let’s get our noodles, our pasta started. Here I have something that’s called campanelle and I have 16 ounces of it. I only need about six or seven ounces which would be about 3/8 or so of this bag, about half or less than half. So I’m going to just estimate and that would be perfect anyway and I’m going to pour it in. We’re going to let that cook on low heat. Actually, I had the water salted, it’s about halfway up and I had it salted and boiling rapidly and it’s coming back to a boil so I’m going to turn the heat down and let it just cook on low heat. That will cook about six to eight minutes. We will want it to be a little chewy, not quite completely done because it’s going to bake in the oven in a casserole.

What we need to do next is to soften some onions because our vegetable in this casserole is going to be onion. And I picked out a medium sized onion and took half of it. So I just sliced it in half and then the technique was to slice this in half and then go down and make individual cuts so that we have these nice quarter circles. This turned into about a cup of them and I usually will use about half cup vegetables for my casseroles, but these are very loosely packed. And when we sauté them, they will come down to a much smaller size and a lot of the sharp flavor of the onion will sweeten up. So let’s get that turned on and we’ll be just letting that sauté and getting it ready to add our casserole.

Now, our topping is going to be kind of like a cheese sauce. I have two tablespoons of butter melted, ready to go. I turned it off so I can bring it over here and work on it. To these two tablespoons of melted butter which I’m indicating right here, these are the two tablespoons that I cut off of that stick of butter so I’m through with the butter. And by the way, I had one tablespoon of butter over here because I really wasn’t trying to add butter, I was just needing something to do the sautéing in.

To this butter, I’m going to add flour. It can be self rising or all purpose. You need one quarter cup. So we just put that in there and you can stir it around. What you want to do is to get these two combined before you start adding other things to it. And I like to combine these off of the heat because you can see that it gets pretty stiff and if you’re heating it at the same time and cooking it, sometimes it will lump. This will lump anyway but we’re going to be adding some milk. And as the milk gets integrated into it, all lumps will eventually disappear, we won’t be heating it.

I’m putting in two cups of milk and then I have my cheese ready. We’re using Swiss cheese and this contains or has 1 ½ cups. So we’re going to put our Swiss cheese, 1 ½ cups in here and this is going to be our cheese sauce. So I’m stirring this around. Remember, there are some lumps of flour and butter in the bottom. So when I take this back at the stove and turn it on, what I’ll need to do is stir it continuously. I don’t want those lumps to stay there. I want to smooth them out and I don’t want any of the cheese to stick. So I’m going try this on to low and I’ll be watching this continually. So I have three things to do while I go away and that is to get my pasta done and to get these onions sautéed and to get these into a nice creamy Swiss cheese sauce. So I’ll be back in just a minute to finish up the casserole.

So my pasta is done and also my onions are sautéed. And notice the Swiss cheese sauce, nice and creamy, no lumps. They’re already smooth. It’s ready. So what I’m going to do is grab a pot over here and use my colander to drain this campanelle. Then as I said, I turned these off. We’re going to add in the onions. Something I always do to my cheese sauces is salt them before I use them in a recipe. And you can get this all done in the beginning and cook it in or here. I didn’t think about it actually so I’m adding it at the end so I just incorporate it into the sauce. I don’t want to add it last thing although if that’s my last resort, I would. So I’m going to bring that over, let me get that turned off. Everything is turned off and we add that to our casserole.

Now remember, I call this a Philly Beef Casserole because the last thing I’m adding is roast beef and it’s a canned roast beef or you might have some left over that you want to use in a casserole like this. What I’m using is a can and the brand happens to be Cormel and it’s called roast beef and then says, in gravy. And you’ll see that actually these are chunks and I have gone through it a little bit and the chunks that are like this big, I tried to separate into something a little bit smaller. But I’m going to leave the gravy with it and pour these chunks of roast beef in and that will give the beefy flavor that will resemble the steak and then we have the Swiss cheese and the onions so it’s going to taste kind of like a Philly Steak Sandwich, but it’s our Philly Beef Casserole.

So you put that in there and you get all that good gravy out, stir this altogether. And I have an oven which is preheated to 350 degrees. See how luscious that looks already. It’s kind of a strange combination to combine roast beef gravy with Swiss cheese sauce but it’s going to be a lovely combination. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

I’ll pour this out into the casserole, a little bit of scraping here. You want to get all that goodness that you can and then you want to spread it out a little bit. So a 350 degree oven and it’s probably going to take about half hour. I’m going to watch the time and I will let you know how long this bakes.

My Philly Beef Casserole is done. It’s been exactly 30 minutes and it looks perfect so I’m going to bring it out. And if you can get a look at that to see how delicious that looks, the Swiss cheese sauce has combined with the gravy of the roast beef to make that lovely golden sauce and it tastes great. So let’s come over here and take a look at it and serve it. You just dip in, I want you to see the texture. This is going to be a little runnier at the beginning when it’s very hot. It will solidify a little bit as it close down. I’m just going to get a piece that has a nice amount of meat in it, lots of campanelle noodles, lots of sauce. So there’s a good portion. And I’m going to serve this maybe with a salad and then maybe some French bread and then I have for dipping, the French bread. I have light olive oil with fresh ground black pepper. And a nice glass of ice tea and it’s a great lunch or dinner.