Broccoli-Chicken Cheddar Curry Casserole

"There's something to be said about casserole. I'm not sure when it became popular, maybe in the 1950s, around the same time as TV dinners and the rise of Valium. Grab a bunch of meats, vegetables, and starches, and add milk, cream, cream cheese, or something else that would hold this mess together. Finally, bake it in a glass casserole dish. The sides get crispy, the cream kinda splits, and the oils run up and down the glass dish, looking like a bubbling science experiment. My mother was never an amazing cook, but she made breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. I don't think she was a bad cook; she was more about maintaining three growing boys and a daughter on a tight schedule. I would go to some of my Italian friends' houses and see these massive dinners with handmade pasta, seafood in tomato sauce, prosciutto-wrapped melons, veal Parmesan, tiramisu, and other foods I hadn't seen before. We were very much a meat-and-potatoes household. This dish is one of those fail-safe meals that parents make when maybe there's a little too much going on. I grew to love this dinner. I'd never had Indian, Pakistani, or any kind of curry, but I loved this dish. I fell in love with the broccoli, chicken, cheddar cheese, and curry cream sauce. Served with a side of minute rice, you're flying all over the world with a culinary freak flag. Every family has that one dish that your parents would make a few times a year that was misunderstood. This is that dish. It's an underdog; the original recipe was probably on the side of a can or a box, but I fell in love. It's a what's-on-the-inside kind of dish. It means well and is pure at heart." — Matty Matheson, host of Viceland's "Dead On Set" and "It's Suppertime!" and author of Matty Matheson: A Cookbook

Adapted from Matty Matheson: A Cookbook by Matty Matheson. Copyright © 2018 by Matty Matheson. Used with permission by Abrams. All rights reserved.