"french fried onions" news and stories

There are few holiday dishes so polarizing as green bean casserole. If it was part of your usual Yuletide feast growing up, the stuff is sacrosanct and utterly essential to holiday joy. The bulk of it -- the french-cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onion strings -- must come blopping and clattering from cans and be baked in a casserole until it resembles a roiling green bog topped with a dry moss of frizzled onion straws. There are always seconds, and there's hardly ever any left over for a midnight refrigerator picnic.

If you didn't grow up with it skulking on the holiday table, good gravy, does that stuff look ten-foot-pole nasty.

The holidays tend to bring up a lot of food traditions and we all have at least one relative that wants to stick to the old standards, point-blank refusing to try any new foods between November and New Year's. But even if you're sticking with tradition, you can still improve on the original recipe. Alanna, from A Veggie Venture, made the World's Best Green Bean Casserole based on a recipe in the most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated. The recipe emphasizes using fresh green beans, not frozen or canned even though it takes a lot more time to prep them, and a fresh mushroom sauce that adds a bright, enticing flavor in lieu of canned mushroom soup. Even CI couldn't do away with the canned french fried onions, but as Alanna points out, the topping can be reduced by half and still be very generous. And you won't feel as guilty for using something canned and fried, but will still keep everyone in the family happy with a perfect holiday side.

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