Asian Chicken Casserole

I was looking for a recipe that would use cream of celery soup because I bought it for a recipe that I ended up not making so I needed a way to use it up. I figured the easiest way to do this was a casserole. We had some chicken in the freezer so I basically typed all my ingredients into google and it came up with this recipe. I ended up making some changes to it to fit our tastes and pantry but it came out delicious! It did take about 2 hours to make (not including the 36 hours it took to thaw our chicken--I wonder if our freezer is too cold?) but next time, I think I would make this ahead of time and pop it in the oven when we are ready to eat.

Here is our ingredient list:

• 1 10.5oz can condensed cream of celery soup
• attempted a 1/3 cup of water (we weren't even close to measuring this)
• 2 tablespoons reduced sodium soy sauce
• half bag of peas and carrots (we kept them frozen but we should've used less plain water then)
• 2 cups chopped cooked chicken (We had frozen chicken from the bone so below I'll tell you what we did to get it cooked)
• 2 cups cooked brown rice (about 1 cup dry)
• French fried onions

Then we just followed the directions from the site. You stir everything but the onions together into a 2 quart casserole dish. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes. Stir,  top with the onions and bake or 5 more minutes.

Next time, I will add french fried onions to the mixture as well as the top (like you do in green bean casserole) because I felt like there weren't enough. I was really worried that this wouldn't have enough flavor since the only seasoning is the soy sauce (which is really strong. You may want to cut back on that a little) but the celery soup really came through. I liked how creamy this was. If you have cooked chicken already and use white rice instead of brown, this recipe would go SO much faster!

To cook the chicken, I let it thaw in the fridge first. I thought this would only take 12 hours but we ended up with still frozen chicken after 36 hours so we just made it the next day. Then we prepared a stock (actually, we just added a bouillon cube to water but you could prepare a homemade one if you have those kinds of things on hand) and let it simmer to blend in all the flavors. When it came to a boil, we added the chicken, covered the pot and took it off the stove for 20 minutes (our chicken had bones in. If you do boneless chicken, you only have to cook it for like 10 minutes). This poaches the chicken and is an especially useful method for when you're going to use the cooked chicken in something (such as a casserole) since you don't want the chicken to dry out after you put it in the oven. Then we just cut it off the bone and put it in the casserole!