So...Friendsgiving Casserole.
It's delicious, but man, this is a hard meal to master! Putting everything together and baking it is easy enough, but we discovered you have to get certain parts of it just right or else it doesn't turn out like you'd expect.
Case in point: When I shredded the chicken (I bought a rotisserie chicken), I shredded it too small, so the end result turned out more like a chicken salad mixture than the creamy pot pie texture you're supposed to have. This may also have contributed to our next problem: the bread.
You're supposed to use a baguette for the "dressing" portion of the casserole, so you cut up the baguette into chunks and dry it out in the oven beforehand, then you place the dried chunks on top of your chicken mixture when you bake. However, we didn't dry out the bread long enough, and the pieces that sunk down into the casserole itself got way too soggy. The pieces on top turned out okay, but we still had half a baguette left, so we tried again. This time we over-dried the bread and it ended up rock hard.
So yeah, maybe not a successful first "Friendsgiving," but lessons were learned, and the recipe was still delicious, so we're committed to trying again next month. Next time I'm cutting the chicken into larger chunks, and we're going to try a French loaf in place of a baguette.