Because I Love You Tuna Casserole
put your biggest pasta pot on to boil, and butter a large casserole dish that can go in the oven. heat your oven to 375°. When water is at a rolling boil, add a box of elbow noodles, spirals or other happy, short shape of creamy sauce holding pasta. Cook until al dente and drain while chopping veggies or making the sauce.
gently wipe clean a pint of mushrooms then separate their caps from their stems. Chop the heads and mince the legs. Set aside in two little bowls; you will need 6 little bowls to set your mise en place for this recipe. The Radical Muffin kitchen recently had a perfect set of nesting glass bowls move in so the cook is blissed out with happy, obsessive pre-chopping and arranging. Peel and chop a medium sweet onion, yellow. Chop three very green, delicate celery stalks. Shred a block of white cheddar cheese on the largest opening on a box grater. Drain two small cans or one big can and one small can of tuna – dolphin safe for heaven’s sake.
in a heavy bottomed sauce pot, melt two to three tablespoons of butter over medium heat. Add the onions and celery when the butter begins to foam, and sauté until soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in a teaspoon or so of celery salt. Toss in the stems of the shrooms then the caps and cook for a bit longer, until they begin releasing their juices. Sprinkle a small handful of flour (about three tablespoons or less; I have small hands) over this cooking base and stir, cooking the raw taste out of the flour for a few minutes.
pour in ½ a cup of heavy cream and a 1 ½ of whole milk slowly as you stir. Cook to simmering but do not boil and stir in a handful of shredded cheese.
eyeball how much of the pasta you will need to fill your casserole dish, and mix that amount with your sauce in a big bowl. If you like, and my best friend likey-likes, stir in a package of frozen peas or fresh if you are so lucky as to have them. You will likely have remaining pasta, for which there are 50,000 uses, and possibly sauce, which is great over broccoli, omelets, potatoes or more pasta.
in the casserole, make an initial layer of sauced noodles, about halfway. Sprinkle with a handful of cheese, and fork the pressed tuna out of the cans and over the noodles. Top the fish with another layer of noodles and liberally grind fresh pepper over these and sprinkle with celery salt. Cover the entire casserole with shredded cheese and dust with paprika.
bake in the oven for about 12 minutes or until the cheese is browned and melted. Traditionally, this is topped with crushed potato chips, which is a pleasure to be tried at least once. Buttered bread crumbs or pink flakes also add crunch. But for the purest comfort, I cannot help but love the gentle chewy crispness of cheese alone.
sicilian pasta sauce and fennel meet balls
uncork a bottle of respectable red table wine. Pour a half a cup into a wine glass with a generous bowl, swirl. Enjoying your wine, read this recipe entirely:
slice two yellow onions and one red bell pepper. Smash, peel, and mince five cloves of garlic. Setting aside the rest for your sauce, two of the cloves and a handful of the onion are for your faux meat balls.
mince this onion finely. In a mortar with a pestle, crush two teaspoons of fennel seeds with 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt. In a big bowl, add these spices and a teaspoon of black pepper to the onions and garlic. Add a handful of quick cooking oatmeal and one egg. These are made with egg in a nod toward my grandfather’s original recipe, but you can omit the egg and the oatmeal and have tasty balls (note: the oatmeal or bread or cracker crumbs, is a good extender to make more balls for cheaper). Let this all rest together while you get on with the sauce. Stick it in the fridge if you are neurotic about leaving out egg at room temperature.
in a hot pot—a large stock pot with a heavy bottom, heated over a medium flame—toast a proportion to taste of hot and sweet paprika and red pepper flakes. I used about two teaspoons of sweet paprika and one teaspoon of hot paprika and red pepper flakes. Pour olive oil into the pot, about three tablespoons, bring to hot and pour the red pepper and onion and garlic into the pot. Cover and cook over medium-high for five minutes: in a series of 3 x 5, every five minutes for a cycle of three times cook and stir and cover the spicy pepper mix. Add sea salt and black pepper.
as this base cooks down, rub clean a pound of crimini mushrooms, ranging from a quarter in diameter to fungi the size of an egg. De-stem them, and slice the heads into threes, making fat slices. Add them to the pot, and do another round of 3 x 5 cooking and stirring.
stir in three tablespoons of tomato paste. Pour in two large cans (28 ounces each) of crushed tomatoes. By all means if you come by this recipe in the heart of tomato season then boil & peel and crush a whole pile of fruit, but in early spring in Brooklyn, the cans are fine and preferable. Add a smaller can of diced tomatoes. Bring to a slow, popping simmer and cook for an hour or longer.
about half an hour before you want to eat, put a big pot of water onto boil.
add a tube of ground beef style soy “meat” to the big bowl of eggy, spicy slop, and mix it together well with your hands. Roll tablespoons of mixture into balls.
heat a heavy skillet and when it is hot, add a few tablespoons of olive oil. Fry the balls until brown on all sides.
pour a few generous slugs of wine into your sauce and stir. Add your fried meet balls. Bring the sauce back to a simmer.
add a box of noodles to the boiling water: spaghetti is Italian-American classic; fettuccini is seductive; and penne, somehow, feels domestic and family-like. Cook until al dente and drain. Pile noodles on a plate or in a bowl as appropriate, top with sauce. Somewhere in this cooking, maybe put together a nice salad. Now sit down with you, and whomever you dine with if you are dining in company or family, and polish off the wine.
as it simmers, you can also read this blog:
http://thyme-for-herbs.blogspot.com/
and maybe, watch a little more labyrinth:
ode in recipes
WordPress, the service hosting this blog, records the search terms that some person somewhere entered that churned up this blog from all the zillions of sites on the web. I think the most interesting thing is it is all true somehow, and if it wasn’t here explicitly before it is now. From what has led them here, an ode to e-seekers:
nice mash potatoes, turnip vegan
squash radical
kitchen witchery
Purslane what does it look like
BEING HYPOCRITE IN THIS CIVILIZED WORLD
cauliflower root soup
chasteberry tattoos of mushrooms bluefoot chantrelles
“tofu scramble“
tofu scramble
clementine and lemon muffins
tofu scramble salsa
Tofu scrambles and omelet recipes
muffin films women naughty
sequins slung
mushroom blue foot 2
Indian muffin market
Betsey Johnson tagline
washington dc edible silver ball candies
peanut butter kiss cookies not flat
queer femme girls
simmering beets
cute mushrooms
Asian children: cute
old people who drink too much
chia pet herb and doctored tomato soup
SPUD DESERT RECIPES
mini greens
condensed milk, rosewater, cardamom
Miso Awesome Soup
The amounts here are for a generous bowl for one voracious feminista yogi. This soup is quite adaptable by size – feed your feminista yogi flock!
Bring a pot of water to boil and cook a handful of udon noodles. The corner health mart carries an organic brand that comes in 8 oz packets with three bundles of noodles, and one bundle is just right amount for a big bowl. (One big bowl eating is typically friendly cooking for one eater, one broke but taste-conscious eater. Those inspired, sexy soups, pastas, and salads you whip up for dates with your one true one want a roomy, gorgeous bowl. Right now my favorite is a ceramic piece that heats up comfortingly in my lap when I sit cross legged on the couch. This bowl, runny with glaze in cinnamon, oatmeal and cream, is my flat mate’s handmade treasure. I gotta find my own perfect piece; I will let you know how the quest goes.)
Slice two or three scallions (green onions). Peel and mince an inch of ginger and two cloves of garlic. Slice three or four thin slices of chili. Chili is highly subjective; know thyself.
In a medium sized sauce pan, heat a few teaspoons of vegetable oil and sesame oil. When a flick of water sizzles in the oil, lower the heat and add the chili, garlic, ginger, and scallions along with some sea salt and black pepper. Add two to four tablespoons of tamari.
Clean off your mushrooms—any kind you like, of course. I used the smallest possible shitakes and creminis, carefully de-stemmed and cleaned with a paper towel. Sauté the mushrooms briefly in the fiery oil, about five minutes, until their heads are glistening and glossy brown.
Pour broth over the frying mushrooms, about 3 cups. Bring broth to a boil.
Halve a lemon. Snip a cup or so of watercress and add it to your bowl.
Lower heat and with the soup at a low simmer, squeeze in the lemon juice from both halves and stir in two tablespoons of miso. Bring back to a fine simmer and pour over the delicate greens.
I eat this with two tools: chopsticks and a big, shallow spoon.
tofu scramble
Press a
block of tofu
between kitchen towels under a weight (like the joy of cooking but put a plastic bag or waxed paper under it so it doesn’t soak your book).
slice 2 or 3 celery stalks into chunky half-moons and chop a small onion. Smash, peel, and mince 2 or 3 cloves of garlic.
Heat a big fry pan—like a 12 inch cast iron skillet—and add 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil. Sauté the onions and celery for a few minutes then add the garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent. How long this takes will depend on how high your heat is and the volume of veggies you are cooking. I like to cook it on high heat, stirring often, to move things along.
Crumble the tofu into the pan. I leave it in fairly big chunks; some folks like their tofu scramble in rubbley little bits. I think it is supposed to make it more “scrambled-egg like,” but I am against pretending food is not what it is and i don’t like the texture of nubbley mush. Let the tofu brown a bit then sprinkle in 2 teaspoons or so of turmeric and a half teaspoon or so of cumin. Stir in a tablespoon of Bragg’s or soy sauce.
Slice whatever mushrooms you have into similar sized parts for even cooking. For example, slice about half a dozen crimini mushrooms into three parts each; take the stems off if they are really woody but on the very small ones especially (which you can just cut in half) you can leave the stems on. Add the mushrooms and cook the whole mess for about another 10 minutes or so, until the mushrooms are juicy. You may want to cover the pan. If you have a lot of mushrooms, you may want to cut them along with all the other veggies and just set them aside until they need to be added to the pan.
***
tofu scramble—just like omelets—lends itself to incorporating pretty much whatever veggie leftovers you have around. That pile of greens you made last night with hot sauce, that half a can of chick peas in the fridge, or some of those tomatoes your neighbor brought over because his garden exploded at the end of the summer are all candidates for tofu scramble. You can serve it with that last ½ inch of salsa in the jar. Although humble and accommodating, tofu-scramble is utterly brunch-worthy, and in my opinion, stands up to a bloody mary as well as any omelet.
simple stuffed mini squash
- 3 baby acorn squash – you can use any squash, but we had these absurdly cute mini-acorn (acorn-like acorn) squash at the coop
-
mushrooms – any and all sorts would be good
- fresh sage
- pine nuts – if you’ve got ‘em; try subbing pecan/walnut bits, maybe sunflower seeds
- millet
- olive oil
- sea salt
- pecorino cheese
heat a heavy skillet over a medium-high flame (for medium high on a gas stove – turn it up all the way then back a quarter turn; that’s about right). Toast (slightly browned; nutty smelling) 1 cup of millet. Dump into a sauce pan or pot with a lid, and add 1 ¾ cups of water. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for about 15 minutes. When the millet absorbs all the water, take it off the heat and fluff with a fork.
toast ½ cup of pine nuts too, and put them aside.
halve the squash and scrape out the seeds and pulp. Pour a little olive oil into the hollow of each of the squash, sprinkle a little sea salt and let them hang out soaking while the oven heats to 350. Turn them over onto a cookie sheet, slide them about to oil the sheet, and bake for 20 minutes to half an hour, until soft.
chop two generous handfuls of mushrooms (about a cup and a half chopped or more; more is tasty). I picked out the smallest crimini mushrooms I can find and just slice them thin, stem and all. If you select larger mushrooms, just pop of the stems, tossing them if they’re really woody or mincing them for the stuffing if they’re nice. In the skillet over medium heat, add about a tablespoon of olive oil. Sauté the mushrooms until soft.
shred a handful of fresh sage. Toss it with the cooked mushrooms along with a bit of sea salt. Shred enough pecorino to scatter on top of final assembly (three inches of a wedge ought to do it).
when the millet is fluffy, stir the mushrooms and pine nuts into the millet. Stuff your squash halves. Top with some cheese. Slide the whole shebang into the oven for quarter of an hour or until the cheese is melted.
Fancy Stuffed Squash
(from the Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, 1977, 1999, 2000)
same process, but for the stuffing:
1 cup raw brown rice cooked with 1 ¾ cups water
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups minced onion
1 to 2 tbs honey or brown sugar
2 medium cloves of garlic, minced
2 medium sized tart apples, diced
3 large navel oranges, sectioned
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon allspice or cloves
1 cup chopped almonds
Melt the butter in a skillet. Add the onion and sauté for about 5 minutes, or until translucent.
Add garlic, apples, oranges, and spices, and sauté over medium heat about 5 more minutes. The oranges may fall apart, but that’s ok.
Add the sauté to the rice and mix well. Season to taste with salt and honey or brown sugar.
Fill the pre-baked squash halves, and top with chopped nuts.
And dear, dear Mollie recommends serving with Orange-Ginger Sauce on page 90. Oh, yes:
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup of orange juice
2 to 3 medium cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
¼ cup of soy sauce
salt, pepper, and cayenne, to taste
Other Additions
½ tablespoon grated orange rind
1 to 2 tablespoons honey or dry sherry
1 scallion/green onion, finely minced
Place cornstarch in a small bowl (if you are using this for stir-fried vegetables) or in a small saucepan (if you’re using this for anything else).
Add orange juice, and whisk until the cornstarch dissolves. Stir in all remaining ingredients (including optional additions).
If you are using this sauce for stir-fried vegetables, stir from the bottom and add to the wok or skillet about midway through the cooking (see detailed instructions on the previous 2 pages). If you are using this for anything else, place the saucepan over medium heat, and gradually bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Lower heat to a simmer and cook, whisking frequently, until thick and glossy (3 to 5 minutes). Serve hot or warm.
