allergen-free chicken cordon bleu casserole

My family voted to have chicken cordon bleu casserole for dinner this week.

Sadly, I'm not supposed to have dairy! And dairy plays a huge role in chicken cordon bleu. So I had to come up with a solution.

Here is that solution.

First, the regular recipe is: you bread chicken cubes by dipping them in a mixture of egg and milk, and then in bread crumbs. You fry them. Then you mix them in a casserole dish with 8 oz cubed ham, 8 oz cubed swiss cheese, and 1 10.5-oz can of cream of chicken soup mixed with 10.5 oz of milk. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

So, clearly, since Nathaniel is allergic to eggs and dairy, this was going to involve some work on my part.

For the cream of chicken soup, I used this recipe and it turned out admirably. It made approximately 4x as much as I needed (I made us a mini-batch of dairy-free casserole), so I froze the rest in serving-size bags for the next time I need dairy-free cream of chicken.

I dipped the chicken in straight up coconut milk to bread it; the breading didn't stick to the chicken like I wanted it to, but it worked out in the end.

We used fresh local goat swiss cheese instead of regular swiss cheese, since we discovered on Saturday that the little man can handle goat cheese.

I made our special casserole in a bread pan, and baked it at the regular time.

Actually, I think our casserole turned out better than the normal one. I don't love goat cheese, but it worked out really well for the chicken cordon bleu!