Love a good Rueben!

I have a recipe for Polish Reuben Casserole that I really like.  I don't make it very often because I usually try to stay away form pasta but every now and then I like to have some.  This was such a time.  We had gone to the store earlier in the day and I took the opportunity to make sure, or at least try to make sure we had all the ingredients. I had figured sometime in the next week I'd take the opportunity to make this.  Little did I know that would end up being tonight!

It takes an hour to cook so about an hour before we wanted to eat I got everything out and got started.

One of the things I like about this dish is that it uses lots of onions.  I put two whole onions it.  Well, I chopped them up first.  So I put the onions, mustard and sauce all together and stirred them up good.  We used to always keep cream of mushroom soup in the house to cook with so at the store I hadn't picked any up.  But when I was getting everything out I found we did not have any.  So we used some Alfredo sauce instead.

Another thing I really like about this recipe is that it uses sauerkraut.  I love the stuff.

I must have been distracted because even though I was trying to follow the recipe, this is the point at which I made my first mistake.  After the sauerkraut I should have put my pasta in.  I forgot it.  So on top of the sauerkraut I put the sauce and then the cut sausage.  I thought I was doing so well.  Oh, well.

On top of the sausage I put some breadcrumbs.  Here's where I made my second mistake.  I forgot the cheese.  But I didn't realize it at the time.  What I did notice was that my box of pasta was still sitting on the counter.  Bummer.

So I added the pasta and stirred it in as best as I could.  Then I tried to push any pasta that wasn't stirred in down into the sauce.  But that didn't go too well.

At this point I put the tin foil on and stuck it in the oven.  Brombeere was making a cake and we had decided to share the oven since both the casserole and the cake needed to cook at the same temperature.  That worked out well.  Her cake didn't need to cook as long as the casserole so when the casserole had about 10 minutes left to go she was pulling the cake out.  In the process of clearing a spot on the counter for the cake she noticed the cheese sitting there unopened and asked about it.  Oops.  So while the cake was coming out we also took the casserole out, sprinkled on the cheese and stuck it back in for the last 10 minutes.

In the end, it actually turned out pretty good.  And I thought that using Alfredo sauce instead of cream of mushroom soup made it better.  We might have to do it that way all the time in the future.  Some of the noodles I had missed were a little crunchy but otherwise it was every bit as good as I remembered it being.  And it hit the spot just right!  Yummy stuff.  We had company for dinner but there was still enough left that I set some aside to take for lunch Monday.  Yummy!