Hungry Jill!

When I was a kid, my mom liked to make this delicious casserole recipe that she'd copied down from a Hungry Jack biscuit ad in a magazine. Melty cheddar cheese topped baked beans and browned hamburger meat, while Hungry Jack biscuits (cut into half-moon shapes) lined the sides of the casserole dish. As it baked, the biscuits would plump up, and I remember them tasting so flaky and delicious mixed in with bites of cheesy beans.

A couple years ago, I veganized that recipe for my cookbook. I'm calling it Hungry Jill Casserole, and I've blogged about it before. But I'm in the tweaking stage of my cookbook, working and re-working recipes to make sure they're where I want them to be. My Pyrex casserole dish looks a little funky here since the melted Daiya burned a bit on the sides:

But I can assure y'all it tasted delicious. This was the first time I made the dish using Daiya (last time, I used cheddar Teese), and the melty factor was way impressive. Daiya really does achieve that same stringy, melty quality of dairy cheese. And it really tastes like dairy cheese. In fact, the taste reminds me of the low-fat dairy cheese my mom used to buy in the 1980s.

My recipe relies on my own whole wheat butter-soymilk biscuits rather than the canned variety my mom used to make this dish when I was a kid. The homemade tender, flaky biscuits are the perfect complement to the tangy-sweet barbecue beans and faux cheese. Of course, the cheese is optional (as it is in most of my recipes) if you're not into vegan cheeses. But that's just crazy talk. :-)