Creamy chicken casserole

I'm starting to realize that because I only post every Saturday, when I'm specifically trying out new recipes and new ways of cooking, nobody really knows what I'm cooking the rest of the week in which I'm experimenting with old recipes and tweaking things. Then again almost everything I make normally falls under the category of stir-fry over rice...

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, repeatedly need to remind myself that food is meant to be enjoyable from a gustatory standpoint and not merely "novel" or "interesting." Today's dish is a creamy chicken and spinach casserole.

You're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that it looked much better in real life.

So actually I didn't have dishwashing liquid when I started cooking, so I went into cooking this with the mindset of "have as few things to clean at the end as possible." This ultimately probably saved the dish, as otherwise I would've used my knife to cut all kinds of things to put in that would ruin it...

Spinach is like...I don't know, a really timid employee. You have high hopes and pay good money for it, but just give it some heat and you'll get very little return. And I guess it's also nutritious and a good source of iron and vitamin A, so more similarities for you. But I should've known all of this already. Anyways, stage one of this multipart monster was to pad the baking pan with sauteed spinach and mushrooms to stop the chicken from hurting itself while being baked. Or so that's what I'm told for humans anyways.

I don't know why there's a whitish glow there. Very well-illuminated. Rather like an asylum.

Next, the sauce. If I were a better cook (read: a cook), I would've tried to make my own sauce, but for the sake of laziness and expediency, I just tossed a can of soup in there instead. Probably worked out better. The mushroom soup I used fused nicely with the leftover mushroom juice from sauteeing and probably turned out better than the sum of its parts. I imagine that's because the mushroom essence excreted tears of happiness as they were given the opportunity to reunite with their long-lost kin before being mercilessly baked in a living hell. Bittersweet happiness is delicious.

Pretty simple after that. Put chicken in, layer on more sauce, powder on cheese, stick in oven, play the waiting game. There was a bit where I was supposed to sprinkle on bacon bits or something, but I didn't get bacon, so I tore up some pieces of turkey ham and used that instead (one of the more satisfying parts of the evening was knowing that due to my choice of not using my knife at the beginning, I could really make this dinner a more hands-on experience).

This made, suffice to say, a lot of servings. It's probably a classic dish to share with friends or family, you know, if I had anyone to share it with who didn't already eat dinner in anxious anticipation of what pathological terrorism I would force down their fearful throats otherwise. Anyway, maybe I can hunt down some unknowing strangers next time and study their reactions. It'll be interesting. And novel.

P.S. Guess what I didn't put in today's dish?