Fridge Finds

I'm going to make some meals today with just the things that I find in my fridge

Now, I'm going to be starting off with a chicken bodine, which is the perfect way to put the chicken and the noodle back on the table with a tasty twist

I've got some extra ham. I'm going to take it, and I'm going to give my scented bean soup a real rich and spicy boost

And with all that spare turkey, great time of day, I'm going to make you a gobbler pie

that's gonna make your family want to gobble it up. And to top it all off, a yummy buttermilk pie

So stick around, y'all, because today I'm giving the fridge a facelift

Now, you know, my family said, we don't have anything to eat

Well, I know that we do. Last night, look, I've got ham

There's a half a dozen easy meals right here that I see

before I ever move that jar. You know, last night, Michael and I did beer in the rear chicken

Well, we thought all of our children were coming over. Well, only about half of them showed up

so I had too many chickens, which is all right. That works out well for me because I'm killing two birds with one stone

because I'm going to take this leftover chicken and I'm going to turn it into a chicken casserole

a chicken bodine to be exact. And it's one of those easy dishes

Now you want to make sure you remove all the skin and bones. And I'm going to need about four cups of chicken for this recipe

You know, I'm one of the best chicken pickers in the state of Georgia, and I got to be that from the bag lady days

I made so much chicken salad that I thought I was going to turn into a chicken

I know every little plug on a chicken. I know where any little piece of meat can be hiding out

I know where every vein is. I know where every bone is

and 17 years later, after the bag lady was born, I still love to pick chicken

Now, I'm just going to give this chicken a quick dice so that we have nice bite-sized chunks

Then I'm going to take this other leg and thigh, and I think that'll be just the right amount for the meat in our dish

And I've still got a chicken breast left to go. So tomorrow I'll probably take that chicken and boil it down

and make us some little pot of chicken and dumplings because it's going to be just me and Michael here at the house tomorrow

And that'll be a perfect-sized little pot. So that looks about like four cups of chicken

Now, you just want to make sure that you don't have any skin, you don't have any bones and veins

All right, so I'm going to take our chicken, and I'm going to add two cans of cream of mushroom soup

You know, you can make your own homemade mushroom soup, but it's so easy to go to that pantry and just take out a can

and the flavors are so good. All right, now I'm going to add two cups of shredded cheddar cheese

You can see that Michael actually did the work the night before

by cooking these chickens, so it's really made this dish very, very easy

All right, now I'm gonna add about a fourth of a cup of chopped pimentas

which gives it a beautiful color. I'm gonna add a small can of sliced mushrooms

and then one of those small packets of sliced almonds. I think it's like 2.5 ounces, and I've just toasted these off

So in that goes. I've got my casserole dish over here that I've buttered

so that it won't stick to the dish. All right, now we're going to add a little liquid to our casserole

I'm going to add a half a cup of chicken stock and a fourth of a cup of sherry

All right, so that's just how simple this chicken bodine is. The only thing I've got to add to it now is the egg noodles

and I've got those cooked right back here. All I need to do is just drain those cause I really don want a whole bunch of liquid to go into our casserole

so I want to make sure I drain those well. And that should have yielded me

two cups of cooked egg noodles. And our casserole dish is ready

It's been buttered, So all we're gonna do is just pour that into our casserole dish

We're gonna put this in a 350 preheated oven, and we're gonna bake it just till it's hot and bubbly

probably about 25 minutes. All right, now I've got one cup of shredded cheddar cheese

reserved to go on the top. All right, so our casserole's ready for the oven

During break, I'm gonna put that in. I've got my navy beans boiling

because coming up next, I'm gonna make a fabulous scented bean soup

And later, I'm gonna be making a delicious gobbler-cobbler. And to top it all off, a quick and easy buttermilk pie

I have to tell y'all that most any day, You can come to my refrigerator and find a spiral ham in there

Why? Because there's so many things that I can do with this ham

I know without a shadow of a doubt that my family, if they're hungry, can come in and make them a ham sandwich

Or I can fry it up for breakfast along with those eggs and grits

Or I can turn it into a soup, which is what I'm doing today. I'm fixing to prepare the Senate bean soup

So I've got our beans cooking. Now, I want to chop me up an onion. I'm going to take a medium-sized onion, chop it up

and I'm going to saute that in a half a stick of butter

that I've got right here heating up. I just want to make sure you get all that skin off your onion

because skin's really not that good. I mean, it's hard. If you get skin in your dish from the onion, you will know it

Okay, so just kind of a rough dice on these. All right, and I'm going to throw them in that butter

and I'm going to sauté them until they're just lightly browned. All right, so our onions are going

and I'm going to just take some of our ham. Now, you know, it just depends on how meaty you want it

I happen to like mine real, real meaty. So I've got plenty

I'm using a cured ham. The thing is, though, you will not want to use a country ham

because country ham is very, very salty, and it can make your soup too salty

So I'm just going to throw that ham in there and let it saute with those onions

and our beans have cooked for like three hours and they still look kind of whole

Well, what I want to do is I want to kind of blend up, grind up some of those beans

so that it will almost make like a consistency of gravy. All right, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my blender

and I'm just going to blend those beans up. Ooh, that looks good

Now, by the time we mix those with these beans, that should be a really nice consistency for our soup

We'll just stir those around and see what we got. Ooh, that looks pretty good

Now, I'm going to come over here and get my ham and my onions

And I'm gonna add these to those pot of beans. That soup looks heavenly

All right. And you can see I got it nice and hammy

Now I'm gonna add some fresh parsley, which gives it a beautiful color

So we got a lot of textures going on. We got the whole beans, we got the crushed beans

we got the parsley, and got the ham, which makes it just beautiful

I'm going to add some salt, and I'm going to add some fresh ground pepper

and now I going to let these flavors just blend together because I want the ham and the beans and the onions to really get to know each other in there Alright let see what we got

It's very good. So, I'm just going to move this right over here

But let's come over here to the oven and check on our chicken bodine

Because it's smelling ready. it looks ready look at that doesn't that look good

now I'm just going to garnish it with some green onion tops

oh it looks pretty alright so let's see what we got y'all mmm

oh it looks good You know, children love casserole dishes. And this is great because, you know, there's some vegetables in here

but they don't have to know that. Mmm. This is perfectly yummy

I'm gonna clean up a second, wait on my soup to finish, and when we come back, I'm gonna be making a gobbler

Cobbler. and later it's a delicious buttermilk pie. Hey y'all, welcome back

I've got the Senate bean soup made and I've just got to have

a little taste and it is so, so hot. I know it's gonna burn my mouth but mmm mmm

It's delicious. The family is going to love that one. All right, y'all, the next recipe for my fridge

is a delicious gobbler-cobbler. I'm taking last night's turkey, a few vegetables

some wild long grain rice, and I'm going to decorate it with a lattice top

It's really fabulous. So what I've done here, I have sautéed yellow and green diced peppers, onion, and mushrooms

And I've just sautéed those until our onions are transparent. But I'm also going to throw in with those vegetables one can of green beans

But I want to make sure that I drain those. And I'm using a French cut

They're more like slivers of green beans. so I'm going to toss those in

Okay. And I'm going to use approximately three cups of turkey that's been diced

All right, now I'm going to pour all of our vegetables over in with our turkey

Oh, and these vegetables smell so, so good. Now I'm going to add one cup of mayonnaise

and mayonnaise makes a wonderful base for casseroles, especially when you mix it with a cup of sour cream

It's just like twice as good. Now I'm going to add two cups of grated cheddar cheese

I'm going to add one small can of sliced water chestnuts. And those are going to be good in there

It's going to give it a crunch. And then I'm going to add a teaspoon of poultry seasoning

So that's going to give it like a nice, strong turkey flavor

All right. Now that looks like a lot of stuff, doesn't it? But you know what

We're not through yet. Because back here on the stove, I've got a box of wild rice that I've cooked

So I'm going to take this wild rice. and I'm gonna add this to our chicken

This is like long grain white and wild rice mixed. Takes about 25 minutes to cook it

Takes a little bit longer than like your just white rice. So we're just gonna mix these together

All right, now I'm gonna take our casserole And I'm going to put it in a pie plate rather than a casserole dish

That's where the cobbler word comes in. And I've buttered these. And now I'm just going to pack these ingredients into our pie shell

One more little scoop. Okay, we've got to have a crust for our cobbler

There's no such thing as a cobbler with no crust, is it? And lots of times cobblers have a lattice crust So for my gobbler cobbler I going to be using refrigerated pie crust

These are so easy and so tasty. They're very, very flaky without all the work

Come on out of there. All right, I'm going to set our pie here for a second

And I'm going to dust the board with a little flour. And I'm gonna make a lattice top

Now I'm gonna take one egg and just beat it up. Now you can use melted butter or milk

Now I'm gonna take our paintbrush, and I'm gonna just paint this crust

and it's gonna give it a beautiful sheen, a real finished look to our cobbler

Okie dokie. All right, now we're going to just cut a strip out of our pie crust

And you can make these as wide or as narrow as you like

Okay. So now I'm just going to set our cobbler up here

I'm going to come in here. and lay our strips out. Now to lattice our crust

I'm going to lift two pieces up and I'm going to come in there with a piece of crust

And then I'm going to lay those back over. So I'm going to alternate each time

Just like that until we have our whole cobbler. All right

So now we have a beautiful lattice pie crust. Now I'm going to just take a knife and come around my edge of my cobbler

and just trim off that excess crust. All right, so our gobbler-cobbler is ready to go into the oven

I've got it preheated at 350 degrees, and we're going to bake this about 30 minutes

The next recipe coming up is a buttermilk pie. So I'll see y'all back here in a few minutes

Hey, y'all, welcome back. I've just pulled the gobbler cobbler out of the oven

and I can't wait to dig in. Look at that flaky pie crust

Mmm. Wow. I think I could throw the gobbler away and just eat the gobbler

This is so good. I love it. All right, y'all, let's move on to our next recipe

a buttermilk pie. It's gonna be just perfect, topped with whipped cream and blueberries

Now, I've dropped in one and a half cups of sugar, a half a cup of a biscuit mix

I'm gonna beat up three eggs just slightly, and in they go

One cup of buttermilk, a teaspoon of vanilla, and a third of a cup of melted butter

I'm going to hit it with my electric mixer just until the ingredients are moistened

That's perfect. Now, I've got me a pie plate here that I've greased

I've buttered it. And now all we have to do is pour our ingredients

into our pie plate, And it's going to make its own crust

Now this is going in a preheated 350-degree oven for about 50 minutes

And when I pull it out, you're not going to believe how wonderful this pie is

Well, it blew me away today when I went to my refrigerator to see just what all was available

And I had a lot of fun putting these dishes together. I've made a wonderful buttermilk pie

I've made a chicken bodine and that wonderful scented bean soup and this cobbler, gobbler pie

You know, who knew I had all this stuff? I think they're just great

and I think maybe that some of these things will inspire you to go to your refrigerator

and see just what you've got hiding in there. So until next time

you know, I always send y'all My love along with my best dishes

See y'all soon