This is one of my husband's favorites. To him, this is birthday-dinner stuff. Fancier than Hamburger Hot-dish, and a little healthier. I believe it was a special-occasion dish because the original recipe had a LOT more prep work and pre-cooking before you ever got to mixing up the casserole, and my mother in law was a good cook, but ain't nobody got time for that. I don't think she made up this recipe. I'm pretty sure that it came out of a magazine, or someone brought it to a potluck and she asked for it, or it was one of her sisters' specialties. Anyway, I'm going to write it out (mostly) as I was given it, and in parentheses I'm going to write what I actually DO. It's slightly different because we live in a more convenient world than my mother in law did when she was making this casserole for her hungry teenagers. I have left out ingredients that pertain solely to cooking bone-in chicken breasts. If you want the WHOLE shooting match, leave a comment, and I'll put the rest in.
Ingredients
5 (boneless-skinless) chicken breasts, cooked. (You can substitute canned chicken or the meat from a rotisserie bird. In the original recipe, there's a long and detailed set of directions for cooking and boning the chicken breasts, because it used to be that you couldn't buy boneless chicken. See how far we've come? In any case, you need about 3 or 4 cups, give or take. The vegetables and chips don't take up much space, so you need more chicken, rather than less.)
1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chopped onion (if you can find frozen, this makes life really easy here)
1/3 cup finely chopped celery (ditto)
1/4 teaspoon celery salt
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 and 1/2 cups sour cream
3/4 cup crushed cashews
1 cup crushed potato chips
1 cup crushed barbecue potato chips (you can use all bbq if you want. Pringles do not make an acceptable substitute. Just...no. Ew.)
Procedure
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Cook the chicken if you're starting raw. Cut it into 1-inch pieces, or shred it smallish.
Melt butter in a roomy skillet or large-ish saucepan (3- or 4-quart), and cook the onion for 5 minutes, stirring. Add celery and cook until softened but not brown. Mix in the celery salt and the soup.
Add the chicken, seasoned salt, sour cream, nuts, plain chips and half the barbecue chips (reserve a half-cup of BBQ chips for topping), stir to combine. Put it in a sprayed or buttered 9x13 inch casserole dish and top with the remainder of the chips. Heat through at 375, about 20 minutes.
