Hi, I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we’re going to do one of my favourite Chicken Casseroles. It’s Parmesan Chicken with Wild Rice Casserole.

The ingredients that we have here are three cans of condensed soup, one cream of celery, one is cream of chicken and one is cream of mushroom. And you’ll notice I’ve chosen a low fat variety, you probably can’t see that but each one of these is 98% fat free. It does not make any difference in the taste, in fact maybe it makes it not taste quite as heavy as it would taste if you use the full fat soups. So we’ll be opening those three cans and putting them in a sauce pan. And then to that, I’ll be adding two cups of milk and mostly I’m using skim milk. It doesn’t make any difference in the flavour. If you grab and use whole milk, that would be fine. And then the last ingredient that goes into the sauce pan is margarine. We need one stick of margarine and I’ll put this amount.

All right let’s get started. Okay, we have our cream of celery, each one of these has a pop-top lid so we’ll just open all three and then pour in the saucepan. If you don’t happen to have these three varieties, you can use all the same kind—all three can be mushroom, or you can mix and match you can have two cream of chicken and one mushroom or you could have two celeries and one chicken, how you want to do it. But try to blend the flavours a little bit if you can. So let’s try to get these items.

Two cups of milk and we add in the margarine. If I were taking more time, I might chunk this into some cubes, but actually I have some work to do while this is cooking, so I'm just going to be putting the stick and there and what I would do is I will stir it occasionally. So we’re just going to go on the back burner over here. I’ll put s stirring spoon and we’ll turn this on, and we’re going to make that parallel and it will allow the heat to come in one spot. I think this will be fine. So we’re just going to let that simmer and you can at this point take your spoon and get that margarine into chunk like that if you like. But that’s all what we’re going to blend together and it looked really nice as a sauce, which we’ll let it sit for a few minutes.

Now, that’s doing it’s thing on the stove, I have two pounds of chicken strips. Now you can take two pounds of chicken breast, any kind. If it’s three half-breast or whatever, as long as it’s about two pounds worth, that would be fine. What I'm going to do is take each one of this individually and examine it if there is extra grizzle or fat, I’m going to take the kitchen shears and remove that. And then my goal is to make this into some nice cubes or chunks and I might use a tray over here to keep track of those. So, you don’t have to be perfect on these, just chop off from this chicken strip, a good size bite. You don’t want to choke somebody so you want something that is reasonable for them to bite into, in their casserole. But these will cook nicely with the sauce and with the rice that we have. It’s going to take me a few minutes to do this. So let me continue on this and when you come back, I’ll have all of this complete and we can continue with our recipe.

Now you can see I have finished cubing the chicken breast, and I was able to get this much fat and skin and grizzle off of it, that means my dog will have a nice supper on that and that’s cooked on the stove. I want to move that out of the way. And now I'm going to start putting together this casserole. The first layer is going to be some of our soup mixture. It’s all bubbly and done. I’ve turned it off. But you can see, the consistency is very thin, but what I want to do is to pour one half of it this large casserole dish. Now, this is quite a large dish. So take one of that if you use one that is pretty small, then it might ran over in the oven. We’ll be baking it this in a 350-degree oven. So we can put in one layer which is half, just guess in what you think is we’re going to get is something I haven’t probably mentioned yet, it’s long-grain mild rice, the fast-cook recipe. I’ve tried it in fact in fast-cook recipe, it just doesn’t work very well. There is pack and a sauce mix in here. I do not use that for this recipe. You might want to save that for some other rice or some noodles or potatoes. It isn’t necessarily disposable. But for this recipe I don’t use it.

Now what I'm going to do is just kind of shake this. And I try to get a very even coverage so I do all sorts of angles to get at it so that there will be about the same amount of rice, and if you want to get with the chicken, you just want to put this in here and chunks so that you have a fairly even coverage. And now that that is complete, I'm going to go back to the sauce mix and put another layer on the sauce mix. And I do want an even coverage on this so I try not to get two, not much, but putting it in one spot and I can just kind of smooth it out so that it covers the top. And then you can see why I wanted more of this half than the other because I need to cover all of those pieces of meat in all of that rice. So that’s looking good.

I'm coming back for the topping. What I have is parmesan cheese which is grated. I chose ‘Reduced Fat’ every time I had a choice here, I use something that’s with ‘reduced fat,’ and that makes this a healthier dish and fewer calories and if you’re watching your fat grams, less fat. So here, I do give it a very heavy sprinkling and that’s one of the keys to this dish. You need to have a very good coverage of this parmesan cheese.

It’s about like that. It’s ready to go into the oven. And I have prepared 300-degree oven, so I'm just going to step over here and open our oven door and placed the casserole in here and it will bake for approximately one and half hours. I’ll be checking on it and I will let you know how long it has baked so be back to show you the final product in a few minutes.

I’m back and it’s been one hour and a half and I just looked into my oven, I noticed that this casserole dish is nice, and brown and bubbly. So I'm going to take it out and put up some pads on the countertops so it won’t damage the countertop. I want to turn off the oven and let you see the dish that we have. This is Betty’s Chicken Casserole with Parmesan and Wild Rice. And that’s a very large casserole as I mentioned in terms of a dish pot, so you see it makes a lot. And I think I told you before that I have a very small family, it’s just me and my husband. We’re empty nesters. I do have a daughter who’s married and has a son, so we make them come over but not to help us with this, and we’re going to be dipping into this nice casserole and you’ll see that it has made wonderful gravy. And the brown rice is mixed there and it’s just lovely and even better than that, it tastes superb. I think you’re going to like this a lot.