I hate the stuff. It’s a perfect waste of green beans. Of course, I’m slightly bitter toward it. We never had it growing up, but my brother’s wife volunteered to bring it every year they were married. She hasn’t been a member of the family for nearly ten years and that crap is still showing up on the table.
We used to get gorgeous green beans with bacon and nutmeg and butter. You can see how I came to be bitter about the nasty cream of mushroom soup crap.
I made Paula Deen’s version a few years ago - it was sooo good but of course incredibly rich. The sauce had sour cream in it, and fresh mushrooms were used. I think I recall that it did call for 1 can of cream of mushroom soup although I don’t remember using the soup. I’ve been making different versions of the Paula Deen recipe ever since, most of them varied to tone down the richness/fattiness factors. Just can’t eat like that any longer! Oh and I used fresh green beans, steamed first.
For all of you folks sick of always getting this at Thanksgiving even though it’s not traditional in your family, you should see some of the Thanksgiving dinners I’ve had. I mostly hang out with the international students, whose idea of Thanksgiving dinner is more or less “Turkey and a bunch of other stuff”. What the “bunch of other stuff” ends up being has about five continents worth of variation-- Last year, the menu included everything from Thai salad to South American flan.
We make it every Thanksgiving, but no water chestnuts - we add a small package of slivered almonds!
Makes all the difference - keeps the crunchy texture and adds nice flavor.
I’ve never had “traditional” green bean casserole. Our holiday green beans are just, ya know, green beans, just barely sauteed with a little shallot and olive oil. I *like *green beans. They don’t need much in the way of adornment. And I’m pretty firmly of the opinion that nothing has ever been improved by the addition of canned cream of whatever soup.