Chicken Cordon Bleu Hotdish
(White Gravy Recipe Series 2/9)
You’re scrolling Pinterest looking for recipe ideas, and you come across one that looks amazing. You think wow, that looks so good. I have to make that! So you click on it, already thinking about how good it must taste.
You scroll down to the recipe card and realize you don’t have three of the ingredients, and you already did your weekly shopping yesterday. You really don’t have time for another grocery run so you think, well, maybe some of the ingredients can be left out…
Then you get to the instructions. And you realize how many steps it takes to make that amazing looking food in the picture. You’re going to be in the kitchen for at least 2 hours to prep something it will take your family 10 minutes to polish off.
I get it! Because this is me. All the time. Cooking from scratch with real ingredients already keeps me in the kitchen a lot. I don’t have time for fancy recipes that take me hours to prepare, or hard to find ingredients that aren’t normally sitting on my pantry shelves.
I go looking for (or create) simpler versions where I can get all of the flavor, with less of the work. I have one of those recipes for you today! It’s creamy, salty, and cheesy, with a little crunch on top - but with half the work, and common ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen.
You can even put it together it in the morning and keep it in the fridge, so you can pop it in the oven right before you leave to pick kids up from co-op, and it will be ready when you get home.
Before we get to it, you can go back to this post, where I shared a video about how to skim cream off a jar of milk, and how to make basic white gravy. Once you’ve skimmed the luscious thick cream off your raw milk, you’re left with skim milk that, on its own, really doesn’t taste that great and isn’t very exciting to drink.
I’ve spent years playing around with recipes that you can use skimmed milk for - recipes your kids will actually eat, and you actually have time to prepare! This is the second of my white gravy series of recipes that I’m sharing over 9 posts. The first one is here.
I really used to love those stuffed chicken breasts you can buy in the freezer section. Especially the chicken cordon bleu ones. The ingredient list doesn’t pass muster anymore though, and I definitely do not have the time to pound out a chicken breast and wrap everything up and bread it. Pinterest tells me it’s easy, but I’ve been fooled before and I’m not going there again.
So I had to find another way to enjoy chicken cordon bleu. Enter the good old reliable Minnesota Hotdish version. (Someone needs to tell autocorrect that “hotdish” is one word in Minnesota - it keeps trying to divide it into 2 words)
We’ve got all the ingredients that make up a delectable hotdish. Meat, Cream of soup, and something crunchy.
Grease a cake pan and start the layering. I love my deep dish Pyrex glass cake pans. First, add 4 cups of shredded chicken to the pan. You can use a rotisserie chicken, cook some chicken in a crockpot, roast chicken, even canned chicken would work - whatever you like best. We raise our own meat chickens, so we raise them big, because when you’re a family of 9 - you need more than a 4 pound chicken for one meal. We keep half the chickens whole, and for the other half we do cut-ups (drumsticks, thighs, breasts, wings. The backs, necks, feet and wing tips all go into one package to use for making broth). I take one of our big, bone-in-skin-on chicken breasts and put it in my crockpot with salt, herbs, and water. Broth is a regular part of our diet, so I’m always looking for ways to do double duty - for this recipe I only need the chicken, but why make only chicken if I can also make some broth to go in the fridge for another meal?
The next layer is 2 cups of diced ham. I always use uncured. Aldi has a good “Never Any” option, which is already sliced. Lakewinds also has a ham with a good ingredient list - Beeler’s is the brand. Theirs is not sliced, but I prefer the flavor of the Beeler’s over Aldi personally.
After that, you spread on a layer of white gravy. You can refer back to my video about how to make it if you don’t know. You melt 1/3 cup butter, whisk in 1/3 cup flour (any kind works - I’ve used GF, sprouted, white, and freshly ground wheat) and 1 teaspoon of salt. Let it cook for one minute, then whisk in 3 cups of milk, and cook until thick. You can make it as you’re putting the hotdish together, or make it ahead of time and store in the fridge until you’re ready to use it. I make a jar of this every Wednesday when I have a meal prep day. That way, I always have some on hand and ready to go. That makes putting this hotdish together even quicker.
Next comes a layer of cheese. You can go really cheesy, like we do, and use a whole pound. Or you can use half a pound. Provolone and Swiss are better than cheddar. You need something with a little tang to it. You can use slices or shredded. When I made the pan I used for the pictures in this blog, I used a little over half of a wedge of Jarlsberg from Costco, and shredded it. We really loved it.
Last, you have to have the layer of crunch. It’s just not hotdish without it. I take the end pieces of my homemade sourdough bread, and I either run them through the food processor or tear them into small pieces and let them dry, so I always have some dried bread crumbs on hand. Or if you don’t have that, you can take a few pieces of bread and tear (or dice them) into small pieces to get 4 cups of bread crumbs. Melt 1/2 cup butter and mix the butter with the bread crumbs. Add that on top of your shredded cheese and your hotdish is ready to go!
Bake at 350 for one hour. This is a great make-ahead dish, because you can make it ahead of time, and leave it in the fridge for up to 3 days before baking.
This amount feeds our family, plus we have leftovers for Matt to take to work the next day. If you have a smaller family, this can be cut in half and put in a smaller cake pan. You can even make it in the crockpot, but your topping will not be crunchy. I would leave out the bread crumb topping if using a crockpot.
Chicken Cordon Bleu Hotdish
Ingredients
- 4 cups shredded chicken
- 2 cups diced ham
- 1 recipe of white gravy (1/3 cup each butter and flour, 1 tsp salt, 3 cups milk)
- 8-16 oz Swiss or Provolone or Jarlsberg cheese, shredded or sliced
- 4 cups bread crumbs
- 1/2 cup butter, melted
Instructions
- Grease a 9x13 cake pan.
- Spread chicken in cake pan.
- Top with ham.
- Spread white gravy on top of ham and chicken.
- Cover with cheese.
- Melt butter. Pour over bread crumbs and mix together. Spoon on top of cheese.
- Bake at 350 degrees for one hour.