The leftover ingredients: buffalo chicken casserole

A few weeks ago, I made Jackie’s buffalo quinoa salad. Not only is it delicious, but it lasted me three days. Hooray!

The problem? Like any cooking adventure where you use one cup of one thing and two stalks of something else, I was left with a ton of ingredients. Luckily for me, I left for the holidays the week after I made Jackie’s dish, so I merely threw away all of the celery and carrots rather than trying to come up with a clever use for them.

The buffalo sauce, however, remained.

I know, I know–Jackie’s recipe doesn’t call for buffalo wing sauce. Bad ass-ingly, it calls for you to make it yourself using Frank’s Red Hot. When I was little, my mom made this recipe for family parties where she basted baby scallops in Frank’s and then broiled them. I can no longer eat Frank’s. So, I bought this giant jar of buffalo sauce, and it sat around in my fridge taking up space. At first I thought  that I could try one of these recipes, but where’s the self-referential blog post fun in that?

Buffalo Chicken Casserole

Ingredients:
1 chicken breast, cooked
8-10 six inch flour tortillas
blue cheese crumbles (~ 1/2 of a cup)
shredded mozzarella (~ 1 cup)
red onion, chopped, or other vegetables, also chopped
oil (vegetable or olive)

1. Cook and chop chicken breast into cubes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Heat oil in a pan on high. Lightly fry the tortillas for a few seconds on each side, flipping and removing from pan with tongs. The frying tortillas will bubble a bit; if this bothers you, push down the bubbles with tongs while they’re still in the pan frying. You can just stack them on a plate to cool. This will form the casserole base and prevent them from getting too soggy from the buffalo sauce. I didn’t photograph this step because we all know how that would go: third degree burns and a deep-fried iPhone. Here’s a picture of the oil for good measure.

I’d fry all the tortillas if I were you. I only did about six because my roommate was cooking an Ethiopian soup with lentils (“I’m following the recipe but I added in kale, because it’s so good,” she said, which would happen in my recipe never) and I didn’t want to hog the stove, or force her to hold her hand over a sizzling vat of oil.

Because we have two feet of counter space, I was forced to get a little creative. Here are the tortillas hanging out on the drying rack. Good thing I put away the dishes earlier.

3. Next, while the tortillas are cooling, I chopped the vegetables. Since I threw out all of the carrots and celery from the quinoa recipe earlier, I just had a red onion. Check out this chopping thing I got for Christmas!

4. Once you’ve got everything chopped, it’s time to assemble the casserole. Using an 11×13 pan, layer fried tortillas along the bottom of the pan. I ripped them all in half to get more even coverage of the pan.

On top of the tortillas, spread out buffalo sauce, then chicken, veggies (onions), and a handful of a mixture of the two cheeses. Top this with more tortillas, layering the halves in the opposite direction of the layer below. Repeat until you run out of tortillas. Since I only fried half of my tortillas, I alternated between fried and unfried tortillas for the uppermost layers. On top, spread more buffalo sauce and the remainder of the cheese.

5. Bake the casserole for 20-25 minutes. Remove, and enjoy while hot. It also tastes good as leftovers, though will definitely need to be reheated.

Sadly, I still have tons of buffalo sauce.

• buffalo chicken
• my small apartment