summer beef and rice casserole

Here's our unplanned Summer Beef and Rice Casserole from the September issue of Everyday Food magazine.

This so easy - so, so easy. We invited my mom over for dinner and what I really liked about having this was that I was in the kitchen for only 10 minutes. It was very nice to be able to spend so much time with mom and not slave away making dinner. I'll give a bit of a description as the photo doesn't really do a whole lot of justice. I added rice to the leftover meat sauce from yesterday's gnocchi dinner. Then this casserole is topped with thinly sliced zucchini, bread crumbs and parmesan. Since we don't eat these sort of dinners very often it was a bit of a nostalgic trip, tasting like the old fashioned casseroles we grew up eating. We all really enjoyed it.