St. Sam's and St. Bede's Recipe Pages
                Bon Appetit!
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Tuna Noodle Stove-top Casserole, 
starting with Cream of Anything Soup

Open a can of oil-pack tuna, leave the top on, and squeeze the oil out into
the bottom of a medium saucepan.  
   If you only have water-pack tuna, use a couple of tablespoons of a good oil 
   (I keep Canola in my fridge) in the pan.  More snobbish people might want olive oil, 
   but the fish overpowers the oil flavor anyway, and it's too expensive for me to keep 
   around unless I'm cooking something that specially wants it.  
   More "natural" people can use butter.  Oil-pack tuna, while it might be inadvisable 
   for those trying to cut every fat calorie possible, especially in such things as 
   Tuna Salad, retains the natural fish oils, very beneficial to general health, 
   dissolved in the extra oil added for packing, and is more economical used this way, 
   when you'd otherwise have to add some additional fat for the saute.  

Saute an onion, chopped, and several cloves of garlic, minced, in the fat.
  
At this point, people could go several directions, depending on their 
principles and what they have in the cabinet.  

I added some whole milk to the pan.  
   Anyone wanting to cut fat calories or costs could use skim milk or reconstituted 
   non-fat dry milk.  
   Those wanting to add protein could use "super-milk", the regular whole or 
   skim milk with more dry milk blended in.  
   However, calcium works together with phosphorus in your body, and whole 
   milk still has the phosphorus, which is in the milk fat, while the calcium 
   is in the skim. For this reason, young children, to whom growing bones are 
   important, shouldn't get skim milk.  
   Bones are becoming important to me, too, as I'm old enough to be thinking of 
   osteoporosis.  You have to know what is important to your particular needs.  

After the milk had come to almost a boil, I added about three tablespoons of 
cornstarch shaken up in a jar into cold water. 
 
As the soup stayed near the boil, I continued to add more milk, slowly, 
doing this until the soup was as thick as I wanted it.
 
If you wanted "Cream of Onion/Garlic" soup, as soup, you'd go thinner than 
I did, then season to taste.  

If Cornstarch (very natural, thank you, just very refined) is too refined for your 
principles, you could use whole wheat flour as soon as the saute was near finished, 
browning it in the oil, then slowly add whatever you're using for milk, until it's 
about right for volume and thickness.

While all this was going on, I brought a big pan of salted (the salt goes
down the drain with the water, but adjusts the water temperature) water to
a boil, and added a lot of dry egg noodles from the supermarket.  Those
wanting to go more natural could use whole-wheat or spinach noodles from
the health food store, which cost more, or even use cooked Spaghetti Squash.

I drained the noodles when soft, stirred in the sauce, sprinkling with
Seasoned Salt while stirring.  (Those with a blood-pressure problem, or
otherwise wanting to cut all salt, might use something like one of the
salt-less herb blends, or a couple of favorite-with-fish dry or fresh
culinary herbs, chervil, dill, rosemary, thyme, mint, sage, oregano,
marjoram (probably not all at once), pepper, of course.  

Then I put the big pan on the pilot light, and sprinkled the top with Toasted 
Wheat Germ, (this could be anything brown and crunchy that you like, toasted 
sunflower seeds, dry fine whole-wheat bread crumbs, whatever), and covered. 
If the big pot is Corning Ware or something similar, the pot could then go to the
table when everything else is ready, if you're feeding a family.  Being me,
I had a bowl while it was still on the pilot, then moved it to a (cool)
burner to cool, then put it in the fridge for a couple of microwave-heated
(or, being me, sometimes cold: but my husband didn't like anything with
cold starch) leftover servings.
-- 
Love in Christ,
Sibyl Smirl

Help! I am lost ... where does the <tuna> end up?
Bethany

Ooops!  Sorry--you drop it into the "soup" when otherwise ready to go into
the drained noodles, and stir.  _Then_ add the soup/sauce to the noodles.

This seems to be my day for ooopses!  Maybe I should go back to bed!

Sibyl Smirl

Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 
From: Sibyl Smirl 
To: anglican@stsams.org 
Subject: Natural Food Bonne Femme (with "recipe") 


Addendum
And another interesting and can-be delicious seasoning is to add a little
curry powder to the onion and garlic toward the end of the saute stage. 
You need to know how much you like, and how hot the particular formulation
of "curry powder" (a variable term for a mixture) is, that you might have
in your spice rack.  This herb mix usually needs a little more cooking, and
at a higher temperature, than it would get if added at the end of the whole
process, when I called for herbs, but burns too easily to add it at the
beginning of the saute.
Sibyl Smirl