Make-Ahead Casserole Recipes

This easy casserole, full of ground beef, roasted broccoli and topped with hash browns, was inspired by the classic Minnesota Tater Tot hotdish. Roasting the broccoli before adding it to the casserole gives the whole dish a much more complex and exciting flavor, but it's by no means necessary. If you want to keep it simple, skip roasting the broccoli (Step 2) and use 6 cups frozen broccoli, thawed, in its place (omit 1 tablespoon oil, as well).

These saucy curried chicken thighs makes a great dish for a big easy family supper. There's plenty of curry sauce, so serve with brown rice or whole-wheat egg noodles. We call for boneless, skinless chicken thighs here, but we've also tried it with bone-in thighs and it worked wonderfully.

In Minnesota, chicken, mushrooms and wild rice are often bound together in a casserole with cream of mushroom soup. We forgo the sodium-rich canned soup and make a light, creamy sauce that gets depth of flavor from dry sherry and Parmesan cheese. If you already have cooked chicken, use 4 cups and skip Step 2.

Fancy up regular mashed potatoes with a layer of mushroom duxelle--a sauté of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots. We omitted the traditional butter in the duxelle and added chard for a nutritional boost. Serve this hearty side in place of mashed potatoes at any holiday feast or enjoy it as a vegetarian main dish.

We pack extra vegetables into this cheesy baked rice casserole. Plus we substitute brown rice for white, reduce the cheese by half and swap turkey sausage for pork sausage. If you're bringing it to a potluck, plan to reheat it before serving.

This memorable brunch centerpiece is rich with cheesy polenta, crumbled sausage and baked eggs.

Here we make a low-fat shrimp and vegetable chili (which is quite tasty on its own) and top it with a layer of golden cornbread for a delicious casserole that can be made ahead. The dish serves 12, so it's just right for serving to a crowd gathered to watch a Sunday afternoon game on TV.

Shrimp enchiladas offer a taste of coastal Mexican cuisine but some versions contain so much cheese, butter and sour cream that they can pack a whopping 50 grams of fat per serving. Our version has vibrant flavor and only half the calories and 6 grams of fat per serving, plus we use precooked peeled shrimp so you can get the dish on your table fast enough for a weeknight supper. The addition of refried beans helps makes these enchiladas an excellent source of fiber as well.

The “strata” in this classic casserole are layers of bread, cheese and sausage baked in an egg-rich pudding.

If you haven't tried kohlrabi, which tastes like a mild, sweet turnip, this gratin is an excellent place to start--after all, what doesn't taste good with cheese sauce on it? Kohlrabi that are less than 3 inches in diameter will give you the most tender results.

The original version of this cheesy potato casserole stars canned soup, full-fat sour cream, a stick of butter and a crust of crushed potato chips. We lightened it considerably by using a homemade white sauce instead of canned soup and swapping nonfat Greek yogurt for the sour cream. Crushed corn flakes replace the potato chips. All in all, we slashed 200 calories, 25 grams of fat (12 grams saturated) and 170 milligrams of sodium per serving. Dig in!

In this lightened-up recipe for chicken potpie, creamy chicken stew is topped with flaky biscuits for quintessential comfort food. Our recipe for chicken potpie takes advantage of convenient frozen mixed vegetables to keep it quick.

This fish and mushroom casserole recipe features a crispy phyllo topping on a hearty stew full of mushrooms and chunks of cod swimming in a rich sherry sauce. Other firm white fish work too--use whatever looks best at the seafood counter.

An aromatic mixture of garlic, paprika, cumin, coriander, allspice and cayenne flavors this vegetarian quinoa and squash casserole recipe. Frozen squash is a super-easy topping.

Traditionally meat pie recipes are made with mostly ground pork. This recipe for French-Canadian meat pie, or tourtiere, is lightened up by using lean ground beef with a little ground pork for flavor and bulked up with plenty of shredded vegetables. You can make it even easier by using a store-bought crust.

This quiche recipe is full of broccoli, Cheddar cheese and smoky ham surrounded by a crispy hash brown crust. Look for precooked shredded potatoes in the dairy section or in the produce section--or use frozen hash brown potatoes in this easy quiche recipe.

One bite of this hearty sausage casserole recipe--full of sauerkraut, apples and kielbasa--and you'll be transported to a tiny pub in the Alsace region of northern France. Serve with extra mustard if you like.

New England seafood chowder inspired the flavors here, but we've enhanced them further with Gruyère cheese and a crispy crumb topping. We like the combination of shrimp, cod and crab, but feel free to experiment with other types of seafood--scallops, clams and mahi-mahi would also work well.

Mushrooms have the perfect meaty texture to complement a modest amount of spicy Italian sausage in this baked rigatoni that has less than one-quarter the fat of the original. Whole-wheat pasta rather than white pasta makes our version a fiber powerhouse with 7 grams per serving. This delicious and cheesy pasta casserole freezes well so you might want to make an extra to have on hand for a ready-to-heat-and-eat meal.