Hi! I’m Betty, welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we’re making a very special hash brown casserole, and I’m calling it very special because this recipe came to me from my aunt many years ago and I’ve made a few adaptations to it but it was basically her recipe.

We want to start off with butter and onions. So it takes ½ stick of butter and ¼ cup—you can see, I chopped this in the chopper and I’ve already sautéed the onion in the butter. So that was ½ stick of butter and ¼ cup of chopped onion. It’s chopped pretty fine and you just sautéed it on the stove, in that case, you abase for your casserole. Now, you can go ahead and add in your hash brown potatoes. You get these in the frozen food section in your supermarket. It’s a 32-ounce package. So this is a large casserole.

So I’ll just pour that in here. And hopefully, it’s not all clumpy because if it is, then it’s very difficult to this point to get those clumps out, but this looks fine. I can stir them around without having icebergs to break apart. They’re looking pretty good. There’s one big piece there but it will probably in the stirring come apart. The next thing that you have to put in is chicken soup. This is cream of chicken soup, it’s not chicken broth. This is condensed cream of chicken soup, it’s in a regular-sized can, 10 and 3 quarters ounces. It has a pop top so we’ll just open that up and spoon this condensed cream of chicken soup into our casserole that’s coming along. Now, if you prefer cream of celery soup or cream of mushroom soup, that’s fine, or any other cream soup. It just needs this amount of some flavored base.

The next thing that I have here is Cheese Whiz. I have a large jar here and it’s 15 ounces but I only need half of it. I need 8 ounces. And you don’t have to be perfect on your measurements so you might have bought a jar that is exactly eight ounces, that’s fine. If you have this sized jar, then just dig down into it and try to get about half, a little over half probably to get the full eight ounces. So this is a very nice addition to potatoes. This is a really good flavor. When we’re through with that, then it goes back in the refrigerator for the first time because you can start it on your shelf as long as you haven’t opened it. But I opened it this morning so now it goes in the refrigerator.

The next thing is I need eight ounces which is ½ of this container and I’ve measured this out and put it back in to make sure I had my eight ounces worth of sour cream. And I’ve chosen fat free sour cream. You don’t have to choose fat free, regular is fine. Just use whatever you choose to use. And those are the basic ingredients. The rest of it is just seeding and garnish. So let me place that over there and get this spoon out. We’ll put a little salt. We’re going to mix this right on so just on top, put some salt and a little bit of pepper. Just to your taste, it doesn’t have to be much of either one. And then we have what we’re going to stir around. If this is not a big enough container for me to do the stirring properly, then I’ll just transfer it into something that is bigger.

I decided to remove my mixture from the smaller pot that I’m stirring in. That’s where I sautéed my onions and I thought that I would put everything in because I thought everything would fit. But the stirring out was difficult. So it’s much easier in a large pot like this. You could see that the color is all consistent throughout so it’s got like streaks of white sour cream and streaks of yellow cheese. It’s all consistent.

Once you get all these mixed together, then it’s ready to go into a sprayed 13 x 9 x 2 inch pyrites dish or something similar, an oven-proof baking dish. Now, I’ve already sprayed it with this spray which is canola oil and I just put individual large spoonfuls out going from one end to the other then I’ll come back and spread later. You could see why we need that big dish and why I needed this big pot because it’s going to be a lot of things but they’re going to taste super good. If you get kind of tired of just mashed potatoes, baked potatoes—maybe you get out of a convenience package that you scalloped or something like that and you want to do something that has a lot of flavor to it, you might try this recipe.

And actually, most people are familiar with this recipe and you might have your own version. It’s not a rare recipe at all but this is my version and I think that you’ll like it. And if you don’t have a version, then this is one that you could try. Now, one more item goes on before this goes in the oven. I don’t think I want to make the noise of getting that little bit off. Let’s just leave that there.

The last item that goes on is cornflakes, and this just makes a nice topping. You need to ground them up a little bit on the stove to use hasty margin. You could use butter but butter has a tendency to burn pretty easily so these could be darker than you want. When they go in the oven, they’re going to bake longer so they might even burn. And if it has butter, that might attract to burn more. An advising margin but I’m not saying you have to use it. You could use butter or margarine and just brown up about two cups worth, whatever you want for the topping here and then just spread them on so that it looks something like this and you can stop any time. But if you like a lot of crustiness, then just let all of these go in there.

Make sure you don’t over brown them on the stove. Actually, mine are a little bit on the brown side and it should have stopped a little earlier than I did. But I think this will come out fine for us. So I have an oven that is preheated to 350 degrees and I’m going to place my casserole in the oven and it’s going to cook quite some time, at least half hour I think but I will put a timer on. I’ll keep track of the time and I’ll let you know how it comes out. So this is going into the oven and I’ll see you when it’s done.

Now our very special hash brown casserole is done. I let it cook about 42 minutes. It could have cooked longer except I noticed that my topping was going pretty brown. And as a little tip, I think it probably would have been impossible not to ground those quite as much, those cornflakes. If I had not browned them quite as much on the stove, then I’ll make it stay in the oven a little bit longer, but it’s done. So it’s fine and I just took it out as I was expecting.

Let me show you how it looks like. Here at the corner over here where there’s a lot of topping, and bring that out. See the edge, it’s nice and brown and the inside is nice and creamy. But that topping adds that extra crunch. That is a really big addition to this dish. So let me just take a bite of this and it’s like steaming hot. Let’s see how it turned out. Good mixture of cheese and sour cream along with the potatoes. Try it.