Of cabbages and kings, frittatas and casseroles

Dinner at this house one night recently was a frittata fail. I’ve never made a frittata, but it’s just a crustless quiche, right? And it’s a popular dish now. I happened on to a recipe for a vegetable frittata and thought I’d use it as a guide. How hard could it be? Of course I had to adapt it—Christian and Jacob want meat with their meals (although not much red meat for Jacob) and the recipe had bell pepper, which doesn’t like me and I don’t like it. Jordan pointed out that we had a lb. of pork sausage in the freezer, and I have found that Christian will eat finely chopped spinach stirred into soup or something. Substitute cheddar for Parmesan and there was my frittata. Only I was way off on proportion of my substitutions. Instead of a half lb. of sausage, I used the whole lb., about 8 oz. spinach, and 6 oz. cheese. Stirred in 7 eggs—and it looked like a meat and spinach mixture. The eggs got lost. I dutifully baked and served it. Christian, with a skeptical look: “I’m used to more egg in a frittata.” It tasted okay—actually the flavor was good, but it was kind of like hash.

If frittatas are in vogue, casseroles are not. Facebook every once in a while pictures a casserole with the line, “Do people still eat this?” I often find myself defending tuna casserole (see last week's blog post). Somehow that makes me even more interested in retro foods. I associate casseroles with my childhood and then with the lean years when I was the single parent of four teenagers, but those are good memories. (I used to make gorilla casserole—the heading said you could feed ten gorillas at twelve cents apiece or something like that.) I still make casseroles. Here’s one I served to a guest recently:

Baked chicken salad casserole

3 c. chopped chicken

3 hard-boiled eggs

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

½ Tbsp. lemon juice

¼ c. mayonnaise

1 tsp. salt

2 c. chopped celery

½ tsp. black pepper

2 green onions, chopped fine

           Layer chicken and eggs in greased casserole; mix remaining ingredients and pour over eggs and chicken. Top with crushed potato chips. Bake at 375^o for about 30 minutes or until heated through. Enjoy!

 

 

A retro dinner and a twist on an old recipe

 

tuna casserole

A few years ago, a small group of friends gathered on my front porch for a retro dinner. On the menu: onion soup dip, tuna casserole, and that orange Jell-O with shredded carrots and pineapple that everyone’s mom made in the 1960s. I can’t remember what we had for dessert, but I do remember the guy who had apparently never had onion soup dip before and asked his wife, most seriously, if she could get the recipe. With a grin, she said she thought she could manage it. We also learned that if you make that dip with fat-free sour cream, it’s abominable.

But in advance of dinner, one friend said she seriously considered whether or not she could eat tuna/noodle casserole. Apparently, she had bad memories from childhood. And that’s still true today—folks either love it or hate it. None of my family will touch it, but Christian has a good friend who is itching to come from Dallas for supper, so I’ll make him tuna casserole. And my reluctant friend? She liked it.

The casserole touches on a second culinary problem—do you cook with canned soups or not. Many cooks are purists who claim they would never, ever patronize the Campbell company; others use those soups in everything. I am somewhere in the middle, pretty much a from-scratch cook but with several tried-and-true recipes that call for canned soup. Sometimes I find I get in trouble when I try to substitute for the canned—in fact, that happened recently with tuna casserole. So here’s my recipe, a twist on traditional tuna but not too proud to use cream of mushroom soup:

Tuna casserole

1 c. white wine

Assorted dried herbs—thyme, parsley, oregano, summer savory, tarragon, etc. (avoid Mexican spices like cumin); just throw the spices into the wine

1 small onion, chopped, or three or four green onions

½ c. celery, diced fine

2 Tbsp. butter

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 7½-oz. can water-packed tuna, drained

1 c. carb filler of choice, cooked—noodles or rice

½ c. green peas

1 small can French’s fried onion rings

Boil wine with herbs until the herbs turn black (about five minutes). Remove from heat.

Meanwhile sauté onion and celery in butter. Add to wine, along with soup. Add tuna, drained, or 1 cup diced chicken or turkey, the carb filler, and green peas for color. If there’s not enough liquid for your solid ingredients, add more wine. You can also vary the amount of meat and noodles or rice to suit your taste. Put into casserole dish and top with canned fried onion rings.

The size casserole dish you use will depend on how big you make your casserole, but it’s best to have a shallow dish so that more of the casserole gets fried-onion topping. Also if you’re using a toaster oven, as I do, you want to keep those onions as far from the top heating element as possible, because they burn easily. Maybe put them on for the last ten minutes or so. Bake at 350° until bubbly and onions are brown.

Here's a quickie that I do with tuna when I don’t want to make a casserole for just me—I fix creamed tuna (it makes Jordan run from the room screaming). Amounts here are approximate. Put a hunk of butter (2 Tbsp?) in skillet; sauté onions and celery; sprinkle with flour (1-2 Tbsp?).

Add liquid, a bit at a time, to make a smooth white sauce—you can use milk, but I prefer chicken broth (and you could use cream of mushroom soup and dilute a bit with wine or broth). Add a glug of white wine. Stir in drained, flaked tuna and green peas. At this point, you can call it done, or you can add cheese. Grated cheddar is good—stir it in and let it melt and get cheesy. If you want to top creamed tuna with Parmesan, put it on toast and run the whole thing under the broiler until you get a nice brown topping.

Serve over rye toast or, if you want to get fancy, in puff pastry shells. Enjoy and imagine yourself back in the sixties. Perhaps it takes people of a certain age to appreciate these recipes.

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.