Deep Dish Tuna Pie

It's been a month since my last post, which would be hard to believe if I hadn't spent it wrapping up two part time jobs in the last two weeks of April so I could start a new full-time gig at the beginning of this month. I also find it more fun to cook when friends come over, and it's been a few weeks since we last got together. Tonight, however, everyone was here and I decided to tackle the Deep Dish Tuna Pie.

I don't ever remember Grandma making this. I don't really remember anything like it, either, but I could just be forgetting. I picked it because it looked pretty straightforward, I had most of the ingredients on hand, and I was thrilled to find something that looked good that wasn't a cake or a cookie. In all honesty, that's the largest section in this recipe box, and attempting to alternate those recipes with things that aren't, say, loaded with sugar can be a challenge. So this recipe looked perfect when I found it a few nights ago. It's clipped out of a newspaper, and while I made a few minor modifications, I pretty much followed the recipe as it's laid out.

Deep Dish Tuna Pie

1 can (1 pound) peas
1 can cream of celery soup
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon each pepper and thyme
1 can (4 oz.) pimiento, diced
3 cans tuna in vegetable oil
1/2 cup milk
1 cup prepared biscuit mix
1 cup grated process American cheese

Drain liquid from peas; reserve 1/2 cup. Combine reserved liquid with undiluted soup, salt, pepper, and thyme in saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat, add drained peas, pimiento, and tuna. Add milk to biscuit mix. Stir with fork to make soft dough. Turn tuna-vegetable mixture into a 2-quart casserole. Spread biscuit dough over top. Sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake in a moderately hote oven (400F) 20 minutes. Serves 6.

I have to say that unless I am feeling especially nostalgic for the elementary school lunches of my childhood, I don't eat canned peas. I bought a 1-pound bag of the frozen variety instead and eyeballed about how many I might need. I thawed about 2/3 of the bag and used slightly less than that when I actually added them to the mixture. You'll know when it looks about right. I also only used one can of tuna in oil, just in case it actually made a difference (I don't think it does). And since I didn't have liquid to reserve from the peas that weren't canned, I mixed water and milk to make 1/2 cup instead. Can't imagine that made a big difference, either. Finally, the idea of grated American cheese really made me raise my eyebrows, so I used a mix of various New England sharp cheddar cheeses instead, which I'm sure tasted a whole lot better than American would have. (Does anyone actually know what American cheese is? Aside from something that I only use in grilled cheese or cheeseburgers?) I didn't bother to measure it--I just sprinkled it on top until it looked fairly well covered.

Finally, I'm not really sure who might be able to spread that dough on top of something that is essentially liquid, but I sure wasn't seeing how that idea didn't completely defy the laws of physics, so I didn't even try. I parceled it out by teaspoons, dropping it until I'd pretty much covered the top. That worked pretty well and I'm sure was less frustrating (and less messy!) than the alternative.

All told, we all thought this recipe came out quite well, and it really takes no time to put it together and bake it. I probably spent more time looking for a dish that looked like it would hold two quarts (not my trusty 8x8 pan this time!) than I did throwing it all together, so it'd be a great, easy weeknight main dish.

Dry Beef Casserole, Part Two

So, the moment of truth arrived. First, we took the casserole out of the fridge and let it sit for about an hour so it would be somewhere near room temperature when we put it in the oven. I used to work at a Pfaltzgraff store, and distinctly recall the stories of people who would complain that we said you could freeze the stoneware and put it in the oven, and couldn't understand that going straight from freezer to preheated oven could very well be why the casserole cracked. Even though this was only in the fridge, I still decided it'd be best to let it warm up a bit, and to put it in the oven while it was still preheating. When I took it out of the fridge, the liquid had largely soaked into the macaroni, as you can see.

I dusted it with bread crumbs and topped it with a thin layer of cheese, just for fun and to give it a little crunch. It was in perhaps a bit too long for that extra topping, so while the cheese didn't burn, it was starting to flirt with disaster. Nonetheless, it was quite good. Next time I might wait to add the cheese five or ten minutes before it's finished cooking.

The finished product was much as I remembered. The idea of including hard-boiled eggs in a casserole is a bit odd on paper, and yet it works quite well in practice. Linda suggested we let it sit for a few minutes before we dished it out, but I suspect three minutes wasn't quite enough. Because there's not much to hold it all together, it was a bit messy to dish out. After it cooled, the pieces came out quite well, so it seems I should have left it in the pan a bit longer. Still, not a bad main dish. And while I don't think it's traditional Pennsylvania Dutch (though I could be wrong), it still fits in that there's nothing green involved, unless you count that tiny bit of onion.

As a fast, cheap, easy dish you can prepare for a no-fuss supper the following day, it's tough to beat. Ice Station Zebra wasn't bad, either, though at 2.5 hours, it far exceeds the total prep time for this casserole!

Dry Beef Casserole, Part One

Casseroles are such great winter dinners. You can usually put one together fairly quickly, throw it in the oven, and go take a load off while it bakes into a wonderful warm treat. Unfortunately, Gma's recipe box only contains about five casserole recipes, three of which are for the exact same thing (I'm really not sure why, but then I very strongly disliked that seven-layer casserole when I was a kid, possibly because I hadn't yet learned to love green peppers, so it's no mystery why I wouldn't have kept three copies!).

Fortunately, one of the other recipes is for Dry Beef Casserole, a dish I'd completely forgotten until I found the recipe a week or so ago. Dry beef is the same thing as chipped beef (I'm guessing the nomenclature is regional, but I'm not sure), but you don't always have to put it in a gravy. I'm not sure that we had the casserole all that often, but since I remember it, it must've made an impression, and not a bad one.We used to be able to find it at the deli--or perhaps it was the farmer's market in downtown York, where you shopped by food type. The fact that I just plain don't like steak probably means I'll never be considered a true carnivore, but the stands at market had some amazing things that I can't find in New Jersey, like dry beef, butcher bologna, and Lebanon sweet bologna, which is to Oscar Meyer what Ferrari is to Chevrolet. They are so different as to be almost completely unrelated. (I've been able to find Lebanon bologna in one or two stores here, but the only way to get dry beef is in a pouch in the cold cuts section of the dairy case, and some stores don't even have that--they just sell the pre-made dry beef gravy. And I think I would faint if I found butcher bologna, though I sure wouldn't mind.)

I whipped up some dry beef casserole this evening, and it's currently sitting in the fridge, as per the recipe, but I figure I'll let you in on the process so far, and will report back tomorrow night after I've sampled the results.

Dry Beef Casserole

1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 cup milk
1 cup finely cut cheddar cheese (about 1/4 pound)
1 cup uncooked elbow macaroni
3 tablespoons finely chopped onion
1/4 (4 oz) pound dried beef, cut in bite-size pieces
2 hard-cooked eggs, sliced

Stir milk into soup. Add remaining ingredients, folding the eggs in last. Turn into a buttered 1.5 quart baking dish. Store covered in refrigerator at least 3-4 hours or overnight. Bake 1 hour uncovered at 350. Serves 6.

This recipe is clipped from the newspaper and credited to a Mrs. Ronald Cosgrove of York. It's also in a fundraising recipe collection sold to benefit the York Symphony back in 1980, in two variations. One says to dice the cheese, which might be better (I used finely grated cheese, thinking that's what "finely cut" meant, but I could be wrong), and another uses slightly different proportions.

The latter also addresses a question I had when looking at these recipes--shouldn't there be some sort of topping? It seems to me that it'll look awfully naked otherwise. The second variation says to top the dish with buttered bread crumbs, and I'm probably going to top mine with bread crumbs and maybe a little leftover cheese, just for decoration. I also just tore the beef into small pieces, which seemed easier and maybe even more fun. I wasn't sure just how big a dish I was going to need, since I tend to think in inches rather than quarts, but it fit in an 8x8 Pyrex dish just fine. It took about five minutes to put the whole thing together, not counting the time to boil the eggs.

Here's what it looks like right now:

Tomorrow night, I'll top it and toss it in the oven for an hour so it's ready when Linda comes over to watch Ice Station Zebra, which should be an adventure in itself. Stay tuned!