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- [Narrator] The following episode of Charlotte Cooks is brought to you by Central Piedmont Community College and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Hi there, and welcome to Charlotte Cooks.

I'm Chef Pamela Roberts, and I am so glad you're joining me today.

So Charlotte has an influx of a lot of people coming here from a lot of places around the country.

And when they come down here to the south, usually it's the first introduction they have to southern cuisine.

And if they get invited to a dinner party or a potluck or church social, typically they show up and they're finding that people are bringing dishes and they're not quite sure what kind of a dish to bring.

Well, this show is going to introduce you to three very, very simple southern casseroles that you can make that everybody loves and they'll fit in with just about any cuisine.

I'm gonna show you a French toast casserole.

I'll be showing you a classic green bean casserole, which is a holiday favorite.

And then we're gonna show you something that's a little unusual, but it's really popular down here in the south.

It's called a pineapple casserole.

And we get to explore that when we get to it.

So the first thing we're gonna make today is our French toast casserole.

And this is a fabulous dish to make because you know, in the holidays when we have family coming over and meals to make and all these things going on, sometimes on holiday mornings, you just wanna have something that's easy to go in the oven that everybody can grab and help themselves to.

Well, the French toast casserole is a solution and a time saver because you can make it the night before and put it in the oven the day of, and 30 minutes after you put it in the oven, you've got a beautiful, nice, hot breakfast.

And so what you're gonna need for this, you need some bread.

So for this casserole, we are going to use just a simple French baguette.

And I've already cut it up a little bit, but I'm gonna show you how we're gonna cut this.

And the reason we're using a French bread for the casserole is because the French bread gets nice and crusty on the outside and it stays nice and moist on the inside, but it's also a very plain and very neutral flavored bread.

Now, to do our casserole dish, you wanna have a dish that's kind of deep so that the casserole can sink into it.

A casserole usually has some liquid in it, liquids usually being milk or eggs or that kind of thing.

I mean, you'll see some of the other things that we use later on.

But for the French toast casserole, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna put some butter in the bottom of the dish and we're gonna put some brown sugar in there too.

And we're gonna make sure that it covers the bottom just like this.

And we're gonna put this in the oven while we get everything else ready.

Now what's gonna happen is this butter's gonna melt and the brown sugar's gonna start to caramelize a little bit.

And then when we put our casserole in on top of this, when it comes out and you scoop it out, oh boy, you've got this wonderful little, it's kind of like cinnamon roll kind of stuff, but it's wonderful.

So this is how we're gonna start this.

And while this is in the oven, we're gonna get the rest of this together.

So to cut our bread for the French toast casserole, we're just going to simply take our baguette and we're gonna cut it lengthwise.

Now I cut this into sections so I could just save a little bit of time here today.

Cut it into sections, so you've got your smaller pieces, you could cut it into larger pieces, but I find that if you're eating the French toast with a fork, it's best, especially with a casserole, it's best not to have to take a knife to your casserole.

So just a little fork size piece is all you need.

So just cut them.

And usually a serrated blade is a really nice way to cut bread because it cuts right through and you don't have to do a whole lot of effort.

And it also is not gonna squish your bread and make your bread flat.

Should you use really fresh bread for this?

Nope.

Can you use other bread besides French bread for this?

Yep.

What you wanna do is make sure your bread is not exactly what you would call fresh.

You want it to be kind of stale, so leave it out overnight.

Alright, in another bowl we're going to take some eggs, some milk, some seasonings, and we're going to put this into our bowl and we're gonna mix it together to make our liquid.

Typically when you make French toast, you have the egg wash that you put your bread into and you let it soak, and then you take it and you put it into a saute pan and brown it, pretty much you fry it, okay?

But here what we're gonna do is we're going to make this beautiful egg mixture, whisk your eggs up.

You can use milk, heavy cream, half and half, whatever you have.

You can even use canned milk if you wanted.

I'm not gonna use all of this, I'm only gonna use about a cup of it, put that in there.

Whisk that up, you can always add more milk later.

And you could judge when you put your bread in there, how much that bread absorbs.

We're gonna add a little bit of vanilla, just a little taste, we don't wanna have a whole lot, just a little taste.

We're gonna add some sugar to make it nice and sweet.

We are gonna have the brown sugar on the bottom, but we also wanna have a little bit of sugar in this mix.

Put that in there and mix it in.

And a little bit of cinnamon.

We're going just straight up cinnamon.

Now something else that you could put in this mixture if you wanted to, is Grand Marnier.

You could put a little bit of orange juice, you could put a little of amaretto or some of those lovely liqueurs in here just to give it a nice complexity of flavor.

And the last thing I'm gonna add to this is a small pinch of salt.

And the reason I add a small pinch of salt is because whenever I use vanilla anywhere, I like to add salt because it makes the vanilla taste like vanilla.

Okay, so now I've got this all mixed up and I'm gonna take my bread and I'm going to add the liquid to my bread.

You are gonna mix it.

And at this point, guys, if you are doing this to serve the next day, you would let this soak overnight, put it in your casserole dish, put a cover on it, put it in your refrigerator, and then you're gonna let that soak overnight.

And what's gonna happen is this bread is gonna absorb all of this egg and milk mixture, and it's gonna be nice and tender, just like when you make French toast.

One of the things when you do French toast, you have to make sure that the bread absorbs the egg mixture so that you don't end up with a dry bread inside of an eggy coating on the outside.

That is a poorly made French toast.

You wanna be able to get the bread absorbing this wonderful, flavorful liquid so that it becomes kind of pudding like, you know, it's really, it's really great.

So you can let this sit like this overnight, or you can put it in your casserole dish.

I'm gonna go ahead and get our casserole dish outta the oven right now, and then we could put that in.

And then we're gonna put it back in the oven and let it bake.

And then at the end of the show, I'm gonna bring it out and let you show you what it looks like.

So you can see that I just put the butter and the sugar in there.

And it doesn't have to be caramelized, it does, it just needs to be melted, okay?

And you want it to be evenly covering the bottom of that casserole dish.

So now we're gonna take our soaked bread and put it in here and just fill this up however much it takes.

I think I'm gonna fill up my bowl quite well.

That's good because this is delicious.

And we could take some pecans, sprinkle some pecans on top.

You could sprinkle some pecans inside of it, which I have some chopped ones right here.

When I'm doing the French toast here, and I'm adding my nuts to it.

I don't want my nuts to be really, really tiny.

Now, if you want your nuts to be tiny, you sure can.

But I want people to know that there's nuts in here just in case I have an allergy somewhere.

You don't wanna put a whole layer of nuts on the top guys, because when it's in the oven, they'll just do nothing but burn.

They will toast a little bit, but you don't want 'em to burn.

'cause burnt nut doesn't taste very good.

Just yuck, yuck, yuck.

Okay, so now I'm gonna take this.

If you wanted to serve this the next day, this is ready to cover with cellophane, put it in the refrigerator, and the next day you could just take it right outta the refrigerator, put it in the oven at 350 degrees.

And if it's coming outta the refrigerator, it probably will take about an hour for it to get nice, hot and bubbly, if you're doing it fresh like this, it's only gonna take about 30 minutes.

So I'm gonna pop this in the oven right now, and he's gonna cook up nice and yummy.

We're gonna serve it with some bacon.

And whatever you wanna serve with your breakfast, go ahead and put it next to that French toast casserole.

And it's gonna be yummy, delicious, and your family will be so glad you have that.

You'll be glad you have it because it's done and you're finished with it.

And next we're gonna make the green bean casserole.

Casserole aren't difficult, y'all, they're really very easy.

And the whole thing about 'em is, is you can be creative with them.

But the green bean casserole is really something that is just strongly traditional here in the south.

And for it, you need green beans.

You can use fresh green beans, you can use canned green beans, whatever your family's favorite is.

We can use mushroom soup.

Now the thing about mushroom soup guys is you could make it fresh.

You could buy it in a can.

You could buy mushroom soup from a deli or anywhere your favorite mushroom soup comes from, but nonetheless, you need mushroom soup.

We need a little bit of milk.

We need some soy sauce because that's gonna give us the salt that we need, and it gives that little, you know, there's those flavors now they call umami.

Umami is the savory flavor that you know, sweet, salt, bitter, we are now having umami in with our flavors.

And so umami is basically like a meaty flavor, something really savory, and it really adds a great enhancement to vegetables.

So what we're gonna do, this is really very simple.

We're gonna take our green beans.

If you're using canned green beans, you just have to drain them and they're ready to go.

If you're using fresh green beans, you need to trim the tips, cut 'em up the way you want.

I like my green beans long and whole, but if your family likes them a little short, cut 'em up, make 'em short.

But I'm gonna make mine long and I'm gonna make this casserole into a dish like this today.

So it is just a small two person size, but you can use this in any size that you want to.

The principles are the same.

We have our mushroom soup, we're gonna add that to a larger bowl.

Now, some of the recipes, in fact, if you write to me and get this recipe, it will say to go ahead and mix all of these in your casserole dish.

Well, that casserole dish is a little small to make all this mixing in.

So I'm gonna mix it in a larger bowl and then transfer it into the casserole dish.

I'm also going to be using some fried shallots.

Now you could also buy the fried onions.

And everybody always loves those fried onions that come in a can.

And people will eat 'em right outta the can.

Just, you know, you have to probably buy two cans, 'cause your family's probably gonna walk by and snack on 'em before you actually get your green bean casserole made.

So it's always good to have extra ones around.

But here I made these, I just took shallots, put them in a little bit of flour and deep fried them.

And we need this to garnish our green bean casserole with.

We're gonna add our soy sauce to this mixture.

This is just the soup and the milk.

And we're gonna add soy sauce to it for that umami flavor.

Mix that in.

And now to get our casserole dish ready, a lot of times you will see a recipe and it will say butter the casserole and what it means to butter the casserole dish?

Is you take cold butter and you just wanna take a little bit of, you can even grab it with your hands if you want to, since butter's nice and cold anyway.

And all you're going to do with this is just rub this around the casserole dish.

And why would you butter a casserole dish?

It just keeps the casserole from sticking to the sides.

That's all.

Can you do it without the butter?

Yeah, you can.

But usually most casserole dishes, will call fort buttering the casserole dish first.

And that's all it means to butter the casserole.

So this dish is ready, this is ready for the beans.

I'm gonna take the beans, I'm gonna drop them in the, in the mix.

I'm going to get them completely coated with the mushroom soup mix.

And next, because my beans are long, if if your beans are short, you can just take them and pour them into the casserole dish here.

But I'm gonna take these beans and I'm gonna lay them in here 'cause I'm trying to get them all going in the same direction.

Instead of having them going in 20 different directions.

We got some curly ones.

Those will go along the edges.

Some people actually love this green bean casserole more than the turkey when it comes to holiday dinners.

And it's a reason this thing shows up on so many holiday plates, it's because it is so yummy and delicious.

You do have the option of two things here.

If you wanted to, you could take your onions and spread them like in layers.

Put your little small layer of green beans, put a layer of onions, and then put another layer of green beans and fill this whole thing up with this lovely mushroom soup, doesn't that look good?

Oh, there's some mushrooms in there.

I wanna get those in here.

Get in there, make sure these are all lined up the way you want 'em to be.

Nice nestled down in that great little soup.

Then we're going to take our onions and just sprinkle the onions over the top.

And then we're gonna put this in the oven until it's nice and bubbly, 'cause remember, the beans are cooked.

If they're from the can, they'll be all away cooked.

If you're doing 'em from fresh, if you cook them about halfway, that's really all you need to do because they will continue to cook in the oven.

You just, you know, a lot of times people say Southerners will overcook their vegetables.

That is very true.

But you can control this by pre-cooking your vegetable just a little bit instead of all the way.

And then letting them finish cooking in the oven.

But there you go.

That is a very simple casserole.

And that is a very traditional casserole, green beans, mushroom soup, and fried onions.

And this is a little bit of a twist in that we have our fresh fried onions that we made ourselves.

This will be in the oven for about 30 minutes for it to become bubbly.

How do you tell?

It's just gonna be bubbly.

Okay?

You don't have to worry about anything cooking.

You do wanna be careful about getting your onions burnt on the top, so it would not go any higher than 350 in your oven.

Okay?

And finally, we're going to be doing our pineapple casserole.

Pineapple casserole is one of those southern casseroles that people look at it and they are very leery about it.

They wonder, is it a side dish?

Is it a dessert?

Answer's yes, it could be both.

And so if you're gonna be making this for a dessert, you'll lean a little bit more heavily on your sweets.

You can add some sweet things to it, like brown sugar.

We are gonna add a little bit of sugar to it, but you can add more brown sugar to it.

You could serve it with whipped cream and ice cream, but we're gonna serve it with savory foods today.

You're gonna need pineapple and you're gonna use canned pineapple.

Do not use fresh pineapple for this, because the enzyme in the fresh pineapple is just too strong.

When it's canned, the enzyme is diminished quite a bit.

You're gonna go ahead and separate it.

You wanna save some juice and you wanna have your pineapple all separate.

We're going to use some sugar.

We're going to use some flour, which is what's gonna thicken the liquid in the casserole.

We're gonna use some cheddar cheeses and some crushed buttery crackers.

When you buy your crackers, sometimes you can get 'em in small sleeves or big sleeves, and the recipe will call for a sleeve of crackers.

We wanna cover the top of the casserole with cracker crumbs.

When you buy the crackers in the sleeve, these things are sealed up pretty well.

And you know, if you're trying to keep your crackers whole, because you wanna serve an hors d'oeuvre or something on the crackers, and you accidentally drop it, you know they crush to crumbs in a heartbeat.

But now we're gonna wanna intentionally crack these things up.

(loud banging) And it's gonna take a while.

So don't break them out of the sleeve.

Leave them in the sleeve.

(loud banging) Use your fingers and mash 'em.

And if you do this carefully, they're not gonna come out of the sleeve.

And that's really gonna be the secret here.

So don't just go whack it or take something and smash it with it.

If you take a rolling pin and smash it, you're gonna bust open the sleeve, okay?

So once you got 'em all crushed up, you could feel the big ones in there.

So just break 'em up.

And it's really kind of funny because as soon as you want them to be crushed up into little crackers, they're hard to break up.

But if you wanna save 'em for hors d'oeuvres and you drop it, or you try doing this, they'll break into little shards.

You won't be able to use them.

Cracker crumbs are now ready to go.

So to make our pineapple casserole, I'm gonna take our big bowl, we're gonna take pineapple.

Now, the recipe is much larger than what I'm making here.

I just have a small dish, so I'm just making a small one.

This is just one 20 ounce can of pineapple.

I'm gonna add the pineapple.

I'm gonna add some flour to this.

And the flour is what's going to thicken this.

So I'm gonna sprinkle that over.

I'm gonna add some sugar.

I'm gonna sprinkle that over the pineapple.

Just stir it up.

At this point we're gonna add our juice.

We don't need all of the juice from the can.

You only need a couple tablespoons.

So we're just gonna put this in there.

And this is so when the pineapple starts cooking and everything starts getting nice, thick, and juicy, it's not gonna be lumpy, okay?

We're gonna have a nice juicy casserole here.

You know, I made this casserole for my husband and he's like, pineapple casserole, pineapple casserole.

He was kind of afraid, you know, typically when I make dinner, we'll go and we'll, you know, just have food on the stove and people will go in and help themselves.

But this time I plated it up, 'cause I wanted him to have pineapple casserole and he would be like, "Nope, I'm not gonna eat that."

So he wouldn't take any, I made this up and I did it with barbecued chicken and it was really good.

And I set it up on the plate and he eats it and he's like, "What is this?"

"What am I eating here?"

And I said, "Oh, do you like it?"

And he goes, "Yeah, I want more."

I said, "Well, that's the pineapple casserole."

And he goes, "Well, I never thought I would like it."

And he loved it, he went back for seconds and thirds, and then he ate some for breakfast the next day.

So next, we're just gonna take this and put this into the casserole dish.

Once again, you wanna make sure your dish is deep enough that the casserole is not going to bubble out and bubble over.

If it is gonna bubble over, then one of the things you're gonna wanna do is put it on a sheet pan so you can clean the sheet pan and not your oven.

So smooth this over.

Now, here's a neat little thing you can do with this pineapple casserole.

If you wanted to add nuts to it, like pecans, which are very southern, you could just take your pecans, raw pecans, not toasted, but raw ones and push 'em in there and it would be wonderful.

So next, we're gonna cover this with some cheddar cheese.

You don't wanna make a nice thick layer.

We're not making tamale pie.

Just wanna have a nice layer of cheddar cheese.

People go, "Hmm, cheddar cheese with pineapple?"

Well, folks, you put cheddar cheese on apple pie, don't you?

If you don't, well, you're in for a new treat because you should try some cheddar cheese on an apple pie.

That's also very classically American.

But this is along that same principle.

Cheddar cheese goes really nice with fruit.

Next thing we're gonna do are crushed cracker crumbs.

You can take 'em out of the sleeve and push 'em on here, but I already have some in this bowl.

You can have some larger chunks in here because those make yummy, delicious bites.

And you want to cover this entire surface with your cracker crumbs, okay?

And if I need more, I'll get some outta that little sleeve there.

But yeah, I'm gonna need a little more.

(plastic rustling) Okay, so open the sleeve and now look at, you've got this really easy way of distributing your cracker crumbs.

And then if you have any leftover, you just twist the sleeve closed and save it for the next pineapple casserole that you're gonna make because you're gonna make this again and again.

I know you are.

Now, this is done like this.

And the next thing we're going to do here is take some melted butter and pour it over the top.

And if you aren't confident in just pouring it like this, because we wanna get it all over, we could take a spoon and spoon it and you could control it.

Wanna gets these cracker crumbs nice and buttery.

Make sure it's all ready to go.

This looks perfect.

You can't tell that it's pineapple casserole can you?

But you will, when you bite it, put it in the oven for about 20 to 30 minutes, 350 degrees.

You wanna make sure that your oven's not so hot that it's gonna scorch your cracker crumbs before the pineapple underneath is heated and thickened.

Okay?

So 20, 30 minutes.

Here is the big French toast casserole that I made.

This is what we make at the holidays.

Now I gotta tell you about casserole dishes too, y'all, when someone brings a casserole to you and you eat the casserole, you don't keep those casserole dishes, guys.

You give them back and you give them back full.

That's the southern tradition is you never return an empty casserole dish.

You always return it with something in it, and you could return it with whatever casserole you want to.

You can even fill it up with jelly beans, you just don't ever return an empty casserole dish.

And so here, look at this beautiful French toast casserole.

Oh my goodness, doesn't that look yummy?

And so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna plate it up and to plate it up, we need a nice big spoon.

And this is hot, so I'm gonna use a towel to hold onto it.

I'm gonna use a little plate because my goodness, you wanna make sure that you get, remember what's on the bottom, that beautiful brown sugar, get a little bit of this yummy stuff and stick it on your plate.

Add a couple pieces of nice crispy bacon, or if you like your bacon pliable, you can have pliable bacon too.

Or you can add sausage or whatever it is you want to, whatever your favorite breakfast meat is.

I really like bacon and I really like bacon with maple syrup on it.

(laughing) So this is what we're gonna do to serve this.

And of course, if you wanted to use a fruit compote, like a blackberry, blueberry or something like that, you could do that.

Just put your maple syrup on there.

And ladies and gentlemen, here we have our French toast casserole.

I'm gonna bring this forward to you, with our plate, plate number one.

That looks fantastic.

And next we're going to serve up our green bean casserole.

Green bean casserole is served during the holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter.

It is marvelous.

And all we're gonna do is grab our tongs and our plate.

Now this is an Easter plate because it has ham on it.

Ooh, put some of our green bean casserole on there and that is ready to go.

And then our pineapple casserole is done when it's beautiful and golden brown.

You can see that the crust is all crispy and it's crunchy, and the pineapple is lovely underneath, what are we gonna serve this with?

Ha folks, barbecue.

I got us some barbecue ribs.

Why not?

You can use it barbecue chicken, you can use it with ham.

It's just marvelous with meat.

And as I mentioned to you before, if you look at this, look at that.

Oh, ain't that yummy, look at that.

There we go.

Put this on here.

It's sweet, it's savory.

It's the perfect side dish for barbecue.

It's the perfect side dish for ham.

It's the perfect side dish for roasted pork.

It is marvelous, marvelous, guys.

I can't tell you how marvelous pineapple casserole is.

I could try, but I don't think I'm gonna do it justice.

Well, what will do it justice is y'all putting it in your mouth, and eating it and telling me what you think of pineapple casserole.

So here's our pineapple casserole.

And there you go, folks.

Three super simple southern casseroles.

You can take them to funerals, you can take 'em to church potlucks, you can take 'em to family barbecues, you can take 'em to gatherings, you can take 'em to music night, you can take 'em to book club.

You can do anything you want to with them.

And you're gonna get back your dish with something wonderful in it, because that's our southern tradition.

We've got French toast casserole, we've got green bean casserole with nice mushroom soup and fried onions on top.

And we've got a pineapple casserole, which is the most unusual one of the bunch.

And remember, if you wanted to serve it as dessert, add some whipped cream or some ice cream.

And coming up on our next episode of Charlotte Cooks, we have a young man coming from Italy who's gonna teach us how to make a dish that brings his family to the table over and over and over again with great enthusiasm, you're not gonna wanna miss this show because you're gonna learn some really pretty fancy tricks from an authentic Italian cook cooking authentic Italian food.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Send me an email at pamela.roberts@cpcc.edu.

You can watch this show and past episodes on PBS Charlotte Passport or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

So thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time on Charlotte Cooks.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] A production of PBS Charlotte.