Recipe of the Week: Halloween Madness Chili Bake

I love Halloween! I loved dressing up as a kid and going trick-or-treating. As an adult, I still look forward to the candy but have moved passed the costumes on to the decorations and fun food. This week I wanted to make a Halloween recipe that wasn't gory or gruesome so I chose an easy chili casserole for the occassion.

Halloween Madness Chili Bake
40 minutes 6 servings

* 1 1/4 pound ground turkey
* 1 can (16 oz.) spicy chili beans in sauce, undrained
* 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (6 oz.)
* 1 can (8 oz.) refrigerated reduced fat crescent dinner rolls
* 1 tablespoon cornmeal

1. Heat oven to 375. In a skillet, cook turkey over medium-high heat 7-9 minutes, stirring frequently until no longer pink; drain if necessary. Stir in beans; heat until hot. Pour hot mixture into ungreased 11x17-inch or 8x8-inch (2 quart) glass baking dish. Sprinkle with cheese.

2. Unroll dough onto flat surface; firmly press perforations to seal. Using small Halloween-shaped cutter, cut shape out of center of dough. Place dough sheet evenly over top. Sprinkle cornmeal all over dough except on cutout area.

3. Bake 18 to 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Recipe found in Pillsbury October 2007 Halloween magazine


From My Experience:
If I am honest, I didn't do a very good job of following this recipe. I didn't have the can of chili beans so instead I used a can of chili tomatoes combined with a can of rinsed and drained kidney beans. I also added chili powder and garlic salt to my ground turkey to give it more chili flavor. Then I forgot to add the cheese! It tasted like a chili bake for sure, but my husband thought it was bland. Perhaps if I had added the cheese at least it would have tasted better. From the pictures you can see that I used a pumpkin shape cutter. This was the hardest part. It was difficult to transfer the long, flattened dough after the shapes had been cut and removed. It was so disasterous, I ended up wadding the dough up and starting over; luckily I had bought two cans of dough! To make it work, I put the flat dough on top of the casserole, then cut out the shapes. For this reason, the pumpkin shapes did not cut so sharply but you can still see the resemblance of my desired cutout.