Green Bean Casserole

This does give one a bit of a heart attack, just thinking of frying some of the packaged fried onions in butter! But it is a smallish amount of butter and you are also browning bread crumbs and you can control how much of this is put on each portion later. I love that this starts with 2 pounds of green beans and 10 ounces of fresh mushrooms. I had desperately wanted a healthier and fresher tasting alternative to the 2 cans of green beans and one can of mushroom soup recipe. But part of the packaged fried onions goes into making the mushroom gravy. Oh my but that tasted delicious as it went into the Crockpot. My green beans were very skinny and it took a long time to cut them all into 1 inch lengths, in the future I would do this preparation the day before. The preparation took me a long time; I would recommend recruiting a helper if you don’t want dinner to be delayed. I tried cooking this in my slow cooker that runs hot for the lesser amount of time in the range given. I checked the beans so often that that probably contributed to slowing down the cooking process. My husband likes crunchy green beans, but the kids are used to the mushiness of canned beans in this type of recipe and would have like them to have been cooked longer. A much superior green bean casserole overall and well worth the extra effort for a holiday meal. I like that this makes such a large amount and since the topping is applied to each portion, it is easy to preserve it for leftovers.