Layered One Dish Supper, Green Salad with Homemade Ranch Salad Dressing and Dinner Rolls

This was a great dinner because all I had to do was get it in the oven and let it do it's own thing. I wanted to help my husband set up a new fish tank so we spent the 2 hours this took to cook working together.

Layered One Dish Supper

This was just a layered beef stew. It was really, really good....everything turned out to be so tender. My husband loved this because he's such a meat and potatoes kind of guy.

2 lbs beef, cubed
3 celery stalks, chopped
6 potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 lg onion, chopped
4 carrots, chopped
2 (10 oz) cans of tomato soup
1 (10 oz) can cream of mushroom soup
2 C water
salt and pepper to taste

Layer meat in a large casserole dish then layer in the following order on top of the meat - onion, celery, potatoes, and carrots. In a bowl combine soups, water and season with salt and pepper, pour in casserole evenly over contents. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 2 hours.

Green Salad

I love very simple salads usually I just make them out of whatever lettuce and extra vegetables I have hanging out in the fridge that need to be used. I got a little bit fancy with this one and threw some chopped pecans on top that I had left over from Christmas. One of the things I love about salad is the dressing. I took a cooking class last year and I watched the chef make his own dressing, then I got to taste it. Before that I didn't really care to make my own because I always figured I could just go to the 99 cent store and buy a bottle. How naive I was, I haven't been able to go back to buying it at the store since. This Ranch dressing is one of my staples. I just make it in a Mason jar. I even serve it out of the same jar, you can see it in the picture above, we are very high class around here.

Ranch Dressing

1 C buttermilk

1 ½ C mayonnaise

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 small shallot, minced

2 Tbsp chives

1 Tbsp onion powder

1 Tbsp garlic powder

½ Tbsp celery seed

Pepper to taste

Combine everything and mix well.

Dinner Rolls

These are leftover from the holidays....I sometimes have problems resisting a sale on Hawaiian Sweet Bread rolls so we have a ton of them.




Cooking dinner in the oven gave me time to do this, our new fish tank all set up- minus the fish, the water needs to cycle before we can safely add any.