Kitchen Disasters and Meat Pasties

We all have disasters—the cake that doesn’t rise, the pizza that burns, something that tastes off and you don’t know why. I once made a casserole of lima beans and blue cheese—awful, but I was young and green and didn’t know any better.

The other day I made stuffed zucchini. I usually cook the zucchini, hollow it out, sauté celery and onions in butter, add the insides of the zucchini (never much), and bread crumbs. Pile it back into the zucchini shells, top with grated cheese and bake. Always good.

This time I decided to use a favorite tuna recipe.

 1 7-oz. can albacore tuna in water, drained

1 cup shredded sharp Cheddar

¼ c. chopped celery

1 Tbsp. chopped parsley

1/3 c. sour cream

 To make matters worse (or, I thought, better) I mixed in the zucchini insides that I had hollowed out. Baked the whole thing—maybe I should have salt and peppered the zucchini, drained it, done something—but it was bland and watery and even the cheese mixture didn’t taste as good as usual.

 Here’s what you should do:

 Use 1 pkg. refrigerated biscuits

1 Tbsp. butter or margarine

 Roll each biscuit into 4 in. oval and pus about 1/3 c. tuna mix on each of six biscuits. Top with remaining biscuits, pinch the edges together, and brush melted butter on the top.  Let sit a few minutes; bake 15-18 minutes @ 400. Makes six. They freeze well.

I like meat pasties, although when I posted earlier about my disaster, someone asked, “What’s a pasty?” It’s a dish we get from Wales and amounts to putting unbaked filling into circles of dough and baking—great for lunch boxes, etc. Sometime I’ll post the recipe I inherited for Nachitoches meat pies from Louisiana—spicy and good.

 But I have another almost pasty recipe I borrowed from Mystery Lovers Kitchen when Riley Adams was posting there. Riley had teen-age sons to feed and her recipes were always outstanding and filling. This is for chicken crescent rolls.

 6 oz. cooked, chopped chicken

4 oz. cream cheese, softened

½ c. chopped mushrooms

2 Tbsp. sliced green onions

1 pkg. 8 crescent rolls

1 Tbsp. melted butter

 Mix together chicken, cream cheese, mushrooms and onions. Roll out crescent rolls into rectangles and pinch perforations together to end with 4 rectangles. Put ½ of chicken mixture in the center of each of the four. Pull the dough up and over and pinch closed. Drizzle with melted butter and sprinkle with crushed croutons. Bake 12-15 minutes in a preheated 375 oven. If they start to get too brown, cover loosely with foil the last five minutes. (My mother always cut up a brown paper sack to do this—even with Thanksgiving turkey; she claimed the heat killed any germs!). With four rectangles, you won’t feed many teenagers and many have to double the recipe.

 Thanks to Riley Adams, and if you haven’t checked out Mystery Lovers Kitchen, you really should. These days they do lots more desserts than main dishes, but I used to get some great entrees from the site.