Creamy Chicken Casserole

I bought a ton of mushrooms. Like, a huge ton. Mostly because these cookbooks I have been reading have been suggesting them, urging them, almost begging me to use them. So I decided to give it a try. This particular dish was found on Pioneer Woman's blog, but because I didn't have all the exact ingredients she asked for, and also didn't really care for all the ingredients that she asked for, I made a lot of changes when cooking the recipe for myself. For instance, PW asked me to use a whole fryer chicken, boil it, and shred it from scratch. I, being the lazy woman with a small kitchen, decided that instead of going whole hog, I would cheat. So I bought a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken and just picked it apart with my hands. This served the dual purpose of providing me with something delicious to munch on while cooking, and adding all those fattening, delicious rotisserie flavors to the meal. This was the biggest, but by no means the only change I made to the recipe, so here follows the grand adventure of my own, personalized Creamy Chicken Casserole.
Despite PW's instructions, the first thing I did was heat up pasta water. I like having everything cook at the same time, and because I wasn't boiling the whole chicken, I figured that it would even things out a little better if I cooked the pasta at the same time as the other ingredients. It turned out that I was a little off, but not by much, and it turned out fine. If I were going to do the whole chicken thing, though, I would definitely wait to do the pasta. So, I took roughly (by my estimation) a pound of spaghetti and broke it in half, then dropped it in boiling water. Note my manly, muscular forearms as they show that spaghetti what's up.
Here is the pasta in the boiling water. Just a-boilin' away. Breaking the pasta actually helps it cook faster, and it also makes it easier to eat. Because you don't have to slurp it up off your fork. So, just take that and store that away.
Once the pasta was boiling nicely, it was time to cook the other ingredients. The first step was melting two tbsp. butter in my absolutely biggest skillet. This is the 12" skillet that my parents gave me for Christmas last year. That's right--I got a skillet for Christmas last year and I was ecstatic. This year I got a creme brulée kit and a silicone pad. Equally as ecstatic.
So then, when the butter is melted, you throw in the mushrooms. Mushrooms are awesome because the more they shrivel the more appetizing they look. I think they are the only food that works this way.
Then, according to PW you just cook mushrooms, and will add olives later. I hate olives. So does N (the fiancé). So instead I used half the recommended amount of mushrooms, and added some yellow squash that I had hanging out in the fridge. It worked out nicely, because I love yellow squash. Especially with pasta.
Then I added garlic. A heaping wooden-spoonful. The recipe did not call for garlic at all, but it just seemed wrong to be cooking and not using garlic, so I was a bad girl and grabbed some jarred, minced garlic and scooped it on in. If this was wrong, I don't want to be right.
At this point, you (the person presumably making this recipe) are supposed to add 1/4 cup of dry white wine. I don't drink white wine. As such, I did not have any in my house, and was reluctant to go all the way to the liquor store just to buy a bottle of wine I didn't want to drink. So instead, I used a mixture of chicken stock and lemon juice. This was listed on a website devoted to acceptable liquor substitutes. The dish ended up tasting great, so I don't think it hindered the flavor too much, but I bet it would be better with the actual wine. If Walmarts in Oklahoma could only sell liquor, my life would be so much easier...
After these veggies had sautéed appropriately, I had to set them aside so I could use my skillet to make the delicious, creamy sauce that you will see in the forthcoming pictures. The mushrooms were wilted to perfection here, and the squash were still a little firm. Squash takes longer (a lot longer) than mushrooms to cook down. This I have discovered. But it ended up being okay, because later, when you put it in the oven, they cook some more. So I think it worked out for the best.
To make this sauce PW invented, and about which I rave and want to take a bath in, you begin by melting 6 tablespoons of butter. Don't be shocked. This is almost a whole stick of butter. But it makes like 14 servings of sauce (or four, if you are in the Knapp-Dupré household), so don't worry about it too much. In case you haven't seen it before, this is what melting butter looks like.
Once the butter is all melted (it will bubble some, because that is what butter does) you add some flour. It is okay to add it all at once, but be sure that you stir it right away because flour will burn easily, and will also create nasty, floury lumps in your sauce really easily. So dump it in and stir, stir, stir.
See what that flour/butter looks like? That is what it should look like. Smooth and bubbly. When it gets like that, add 2 cups of chicken broth. Theoretically, this is meant to come from the chicken you have just boiled whole. But in my world, I used Swanson's. My plebian palate didn't notice a difference.
When that is all stirred in, the sauce will look disgusting. Like, really nasty. Unless you are super attracted to the look of chicken broth, which I am not. But it's okay, because you immediately get to add whole milk. I didn't have any whole milk, so I added an equal parts mixture of 2% and heavy whipping cream, which seemed to balance out into the right consistency. At least, it reacted in the sauce the way PW's instructions said it was supposed to, and it definitely tasted delicious when it was finished cooking. Plus, PW substitutes cream for milk all the time, and if she can do it, I can definitely do it.
At this point you are supposed to add another 1/4 cup white wine. So I added another 1/4 cup of my lemon juice/chicken stock mixture. I hesitated, because as far as I could tell the wine was mostly there for flavor, and goodness knows the sauce had a ton of chicken in it already. But then I started worrying about the sauce needing that liquid in there for some chemical reason, so I just added it. And it didn't make the sauce soupy or anything.
So that is what the simmering sauce looks like. Nice and creamy. I added salt and pepper for flavor (per PW's directions) and then let it bubble (also per PW's instructions). It really thickened nicely. Much better than any batch of gravy I have ever made.
The cheese!! This is my favorite part, because cheese is my favorite food. I can't remember the last time I had a day without cheese. That would be a very sad day. And in this recipe you get to add a ton of cheese to the sauce. One whole cup of freshly grated parmesan. I don't like grating cheese, so I used half of the pre-shredded stuff, and half the Kraft grated parmesan that you put on top of spaghetti. It melted just fine, you just have to look for little clumps, like when you are mixing cake batter.
Then the chicken. I had shredded up 2 cups of rotisserie chicken and I tossed it in enthusiastically. My skillet was starting to get really full by now, and I was really glad that I had used my biggest skillet.
Once the chicken was mixed in, it was time to add the mushrooms and squash back in. That sauce was inching quickly toward the edge of the pan.
Then I had to add the cooked spaghetti. As you can see, by this time, the sauce really did start spilling over as I tried to mix everything together. Eventually I had to just transfer it to the casserole dish and mix it better there.
Here it is in the casserole dish, after I had mixed it together a little bit better. Then, as according to the recipe, I sprinkled the top with more cheese (yay)! Finally, it was time to pop it in the oven for the final stage of cooking. So I popped it right in. (Dirty!)
This, my dears, is the final product! It probably could have stood a couple more minutes in the oven to make the top really brown and crispy, but N. and I were totally starving so I took it out early and we ate it right away.

And it was delicious. So creamy, and the noodles were firm and chewy, the mushrooms were soft, the squash was delightful. Everything about this recipe screams "make me again, make me again!" And I probably will. I might not even put it in the oven next time, because it would probably be just as good as a regular pasta dish rather than a casserole. That is something I love about PW's recipes. They are so easy to adapt, substitute, and rework, so that you are really making your own recipe. I hate recipes with tons of obscure ingredients that can't be supplanted by anything more simple. Or recipes that I can't remember after making them a couple times without using the piece of paper. This recipe is versatile enough that I can make the sauce with any kind of noodle/veggie combination and it will be amazing. So, with the full approval of N., I think this recipe has earned its spot on my regular rotation.

I would recommend that you all go out right now and try this dish. The original recipe can be found here. But I would definitely suggest that you play around with it and have fun. Because that is what home cooking is really all about.