Fabulous recipe without any changes (five stars worth!), and even better once you start tailoring it to your own tastes. I rarely measure the cheese so don't be worried if you have to fudge it a bit, and have substituted havarti for the romano twice now. It gives it a creamier consistency and a more mellow flavor. I usually double the artichokes and have added variation such as roasted red peppers, bacon, sauteed garlic and onions, 1/2 sour cream 1/2 mayo, canned crab meat, salad shrimp, clams, olives, scallions on top...mmm. My favorite chip to serve with it are the Simply Naked Pita Chips from costco.

Reviewed On: Nov. 29, 2009

This was a great alternative to the classic (yet unappealing) campbell's green bean casserole. I thought the sauce mixture blended well with the green beans without giving the the over-salted instant casserole flavor you get with cream of mushroom soup. I think two cups of cheese is a little excessive for this (adding that much cheese to a casserole this small just means there's a lack of flavor and the dish needs cheese to cover it up) and would recommend doubling it if you want to feed ten people with it. A good modification would be to omit the cheese on top and only include maybe 3/4 c. in the filling.

Reviewed On: Nov. 29, 2009

I'm not sure how to rate this since I doubled the recipe and it didn't work. Maybe it would have worked if I left it alone, but besides doubling it I didn't change a thing; hence the one star. Everything seemed to be fine until I started adding the flour, then the dough dried out really, really quickly. I was using my kitchen-aid mixer (I've used it to make bread before with no problems) and noticed the bread was getting dry, so cut out a full 1/4 cup. Despite that, it was still waaaay to hard to knead by hand so I started gradually adding water to loosen it up. After adding a quarter cup I finally got it to the point where my mixer wasn't grinding gears trying to combine everything and again tried to knead it by hand. I thought maybe it was a really stiff dough that wasn't supposed to get elastic-ey and shiny-smooth like most yeasty breads and finally decided to leave it alone and let rise. It rose fine the first time, then only rose to about 1.25 times its normal size when in pans (i left it alone for about an hour and a half). What I ended up with was a rock hard brick of bread with almost no flavor and poppy seeds all over my counter. I don't know if the corn flour was a mistake and it really needed cornmeal instead (less moisture absorption) or maybe all the mixing over-kneaded it and destroyed the rising properties, but it turned out to be nothing but a sad, hard, mess. I'll try it again as a single recipe and let y'all know how it goes.

Reviewed On: Nov. 29, 2009