Back to comfort food

Whether you toasted the new year in with champagne and caviar or beer and brats, the holidays are now behind us, and we’re back to ho-hum, the daily grind, everyday living. Many of us are ready to put the huge and extravagant meals of the holidays behind us and turn to some good, old-fashioned dishes like Mom used to fix. Maybe even some retro foods.

I have just gotten a shipment of the albacore tuna I order from a mom-and-pop operation in Oregon. The Pisces Fishing vessel does not use nets, so dolphins swim along beside their boats. Their catch—tuna and some salmon—is humanely harvested, field dressed, and quickly iced at sea. The fish are filleted fresh and hand-packed with only a bit of salt at a small, family-owned cannery (I am more convinced daily that we get our purest food from such small operators and not the big commercial processing plants, especially since the relaxation of regulations). Finally the fish is only cooked once, after canning—most commercially canned fish is cooked once before canning and once after. Take it from a lifetime tuna aficionado, the difference in taste and texture is remarkable.

So here I am with half a case of 7 oz. cans of tuna—the other half went to a son who love it as much as I do. I can only make so much tuna salad—but there’s always tuna casserole. Some people scoff at that dish as a retro food, “so sixties!” I love it.

Several years ago friends gathered on my front porch for a retro  pot-luck dinner—onion soup/sour with Ruffes. The entree was tuna casserole, with a side of that orange Jell-O dish with grated carrots and pineapple chunks. The onion soup dip was a hit, especially with one guy who asked his wife seriously if she could get the recipe. She smiled like a sphinx and said she thought she could. There was some hesitation about the tuna casserole, and one friend later confessed that she wondered to herself if she could really eat it. She did—and complimented it lavishly. Wish I could remember what the dessert was.

Back to tuna casserole. I make it after a recipe I found in a women’s magazine more years ago than I like to confess to. By now I make it from memory and have no idea where the original recipe is. The measurements here are sort of guesses on my par but this should feed four with some leftovers.

Ingredients

1 cup white wine

Assorted herbs

1 7-oz. can albacore tuna, flaked

3 green onions, trimmed and sliced thin

1 can mushroom soup, undiluted

½ cup frozen petite peas

6 oz. uncooked pasta (cut spaghetti, etc, but probably not tubes) or rice—your choice

French’s French-fried onion rings

            Separately cook pasta or rice and set aside.

Bring wine to a boil in a saucepan; throw in a handful of mixed herbs—thyme, oregano, basil, whatever (I’d avoid Mexican spices like cumin and chile powder unless you wanted a definitive Mexican tuna casserole). Add some black pepper and scant salt. Boil hard for three minutes or more until all the herbs turn black. Remove pan from heat, and gradually add remaining ingredients except onion rings. Taste for salt and pepper.

Spoon into a greased casserole or individual ramekins and top with onion rings. Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes—watch color of onion rings as a guide. They should brown but not burn. Casserole just has to get hot. Serve immediately.

PS You don’t have to do that orange Jell-O thing; a tossed salad is nice with this.