Recipe: Chicken & Black Bean Soup Casserole

Gluten-Free Café introduced several soups many months ago, including their version of Chicken Noodle. If you missed Kim’s review of it, you can read it here. I wasn’t overly impressed with that gluten-free Café soup, but I decided to try the Black Bean soup from the line anyway.

The soup sat in the pantry for a while because I didn’t want to use it as soup. I wanted to use it to make a casserole of some kind. Finally, last week, I thought of something to make with the Black Bean soup. Even though I made this dish on a weekend evening, I was in a rush to get dinner together. The result was a surprisingly tasty casserole and it can be modified easily to suit one’s personal preferences.

Ingredients:

• 3 C. cooked chicken pieces (I used left over rotisserie chicken)
• 1 can black bean soup
• ¾ C. shredded cheddar cheese
• Fritos corn chips (optional)

Instructions:

1. Mix chicken, soup and cheese together and put into a greased baking dish.
2. Top mixture with corn chips (regular size or crushed Scoops chips)
3. Bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.
4. Serve over fresh green salad or rice.
5. Top with sour cream if desired.

There are several things you can do to jazz up this basic casserole. The soup is very good, but not very spicy so I might add minced jalapenos or green chilies the next time I make the casserole. You could use Mexican cheese instead of plain cheddar and you could add corn or other veggies to it as well.

Even though not much thought went into making this last minute dish, my husband liked it so much that he had three servings, finishing off the entire thing. It really was very good and with a little tweaking, it could be outstanding. That is my kind of recipe – simple to make using only a few ingredients.

Sometimes people get stuck in a rut when they are on a restricted diet for whatever reason. It can be easier to just rotate several tried and true dishes again and again, instead of making something new. It took me quite a while to trust myself to start throwing things together without following a recipe.

As much fun as it is to follow a great recipe and end up with wonderful results, it’s even more rewarding when you open up the pantry and fridge and figure out how to use what you find to create something new. It doesn’t have to be complicated or a masterpiece. Have fun with your gluten-free creations – you never know what you might come up with next!