Thanksgiving Dinner Canned

Canned Food Challenge Meal #2

Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite meal. I thought it would be interesting to make a Thanksgiving dinner casserole from all canned products. This stroke of genius came when I discovered that I had thrown a can of whole berry cranberry sauce into my cart. It was maybe the second easiest meal I've ever put together.

First I made a box of stove top cornbread stuffing. Just follow the directions on the box. The box calls for half a stick of butter, but you can actually make it without it if you need/want.  I also preheated my oven to 350. Why 350? It's my default temperature when I'm not working from a recipe.

As far as building the casserole, I started out with canned sweet potatoes, which I rinsed because they had added sugar and I didn't want it to be too sweet. I dumped them into the bottom of a 9 x 9 Corning ware dish. 

Next I drained a can of mixed seasoned greens really well. I mean REALLY well! Looking back the preseasoned greens had an awful lot of vinegar in them, and if I do this again I'll use plain greens or spinach. Then I spread about half the can on top of the sweet potatoes.

I added a can of chicken chunks next. I drained and rinsed this again. You could completely leave out the chicken if you wanted to do a veggie dish, or to cut costs. This was by far the most expensive item at $2.30. I put half of the can of cranberry sauce on top of the chicken.  I should have used the whole can! 

I topped everything with a thick layer of the stuffing and covered it with foil. I put it in to bake for 30 minutes. Then I took the foil off and let it go for another 30 minutes to crisp up the top of the stuffing. I topped it with canned turkey gravy. 

It was absolutely fantastic and I ended up with two lunches and two dinners and, don't laugh, one breakfast. Yup it was so good that I ate the last small portion for breakfast one day . . . cold. 

So here's what I used:

1 can of sweet potatoes: $.88

1 can of greens: $.99

1 can of chicken: $2.30

1 can of cranberry sauce: $.50

1 box of stove top stuffing: $1.00

1 can of gravy: $1.00

The casserole cost a total of $6.67 to put together and I got five meals out of it so . . . $1.33 per meal. Without the chicken this is a real bargain at $4.37 or $.87 per meal. Just so you know I didn't add salt or pepper to anything because the greens were heavily seasoned and I didn't want to add to that!