Prize-Winning Casserole from 1979

Included with the above article are the recipes. And there's no sense wasting time and effort on anything less than the best, so I made the Spinach and Ham Roll-Ups. But of course it wasn't entirely straight-forward. For a start, I had no idea where to get cream of celery soup. So I'd have to make my own. That would be step one.

The soup's pretty straight-forward. You put the vegetables into a saucepan with some oil, you add some stock and let it cook till the vegetables are soft, then you throw it into the food processor before putting it back on the stove and adding the cream. Soup!

So far so good. The soup was ok. I'm not a big fan of celery, but you can barely taste it so who cares. I'd rather make cauliflower or pumpkin soup, but it's fine. Which is good because I've got plenty of it left. But all this was just to create a replacement for one ingredient of our main dish.

So first we take some of our soup, and we add sour cream and mustard. Then we set that aside while we get the rest of our ingredients together.

Flour; rice; onion; spinach; cottage cheese; an egg; half of the soup-cream-mustard mix. Extremely weird to see onion and spinach measured by volume, by the way. Sheer lunacy. It's bad enough having to convert all the cups and ounces and so forth, but measuring vegetables by how much space they take up after they're chopped into little bits is a step too far.

Then we mix them all together.

Then all that's left is to construct the monstrosity. Wrapping the mixture in the ham slices is easy, but time-consuming, and it's difficult to see what benefit there is to doing it. They'll be completely hidden anyway, as the next step is to pour the remaining soup-cream-mustard mix over the top, and finish with bread crumbs and paprika. So there's no visual appeal factor - not that there would be anyway given what they look like.

Wanting to be thorough, I bought bread crumbs. I used a small handful of them and now I have a big bag of bread crumbs that I have no use for.

Then we bake and serve it. And what can I say? It's very...

bland.

It's very bland. It tastes a little of onion and a little of mustard and that's about it.

It was a lot of effort for such a nothing meal. You know what you could do instead? Scrambled eggs. Or even just skip the rolling it up in ham step. Chop the ham up and throw it in the mix.

But seriously, just make scrambled eggs. It's easier and tastes better. Make an an omelette if you're feeling fancy. Or quiche if you want to go all out.

Oh, and a little bit of salt won't kill you either. I added some and it (along with some pepper) greatly improved the flavour (by which I mean it actually had some). You could throw some olives or sun-dried tomatoes or chillies or something in there as well.

Into your scrambled eggs, I mean. Because you shouldn't make this.