Pan Seared Tuna with Mango Radish Coulis – NOT

/ wvfurandroot / 1 Comment
Fresh ground pepper and an elegant presentation always helps.

Fresh ground pepper and an elegant presentation always helps.

I do enjoy foods that those with sophisticated palates (or a lot of money) eat regularly. Just ask Chef Boy ‘R Mine. I’m his guinea pig. [And it’s about time he comes home and cooks for me again.]

I also like a lot of junk food, pseudo food, comfort food and stuff that is plain fare. I even like stuff, some of it, that involves a can of Cream-of-Something soup.

So sue me.

In the junk food category, I get weak-kneed over Cheez-Its. Ruffles (have ridges) potato chips and Slim Jims are perennial favorites. As for pseudo food, I like Twinkies (though I prefer SnoBalls), but will not abide Cool Whip.

Comfort food and plain fare remind me of my childhood, which was good, and serve, well, to comfort me. Plain fare I regard as further up the haute cuisine ladder than comfort food. Comfort foods are those things that you’re a little embarrassed about liking. Spam is one. Morton beef pot pies are another.

When I was about 10, maybe 11, I read a Beverly Cleary book about a high school girl and her first date. I was beginning to find boys a little interesting, but overall was pretty clueless. For those of you not initiated, Cleary wrote children’s books – Ramona, Beezus, Henry Huggins – which were funny and poignant. While they sometimes had a moral, the heavy-handedness of it was blunted by the comedy. Beverly Cleary could channel all those feelings and ideas and actions of a kid somewhere between 5 and 10 years old. She wrote a few books about teenagers. They weren’t as compelling.

In this book that I’ve forgotten the name of, the protagonist is a bundle of nerves before her first date. She worries about everything including whether or not her mother is going to make Smells to Heaven Tuna Casserole. Cleary, knowing her audience, explained the onion breath problem. Most ten year olds, at least in my day, didn’t worry too much about bad breath.

It’s either a testament to Cleary’s writing or my love of tuna casserole or, perhaps, both that forty years later I remember that detail.

I like tuna casserole. I don’t remember not ever liking it.

My mom made it with Cream of Mushroom Soup, noodles, onions, sometimes celery and tuna. After putting it in a baking dish, she crushed potato chips and spread them on top of the casserole about a 1/2 inch thick.

Now I did and do abhor canned mushrooms. They’re not even as good as pencil erasers (something I chewed on quite a bit as a kid). I hate them, and when we had tuna casserole, I ate around them. They’re chopped up fine and those tiny little suckers could really slow down the eating process.

When I started making my own tuna casserole, I discovered Cream of Celery soup.

Well, well.

I love celery. I toss it in anything I can get away with. Cream of Celery soup and chopped celery became necessities in the production of perfect tuna casserole.

I use the extra-wide noodles. I don’t want any wimpy noodles likely to get limp and pasty. I want them bold and al dente. This is a must.

I’m not sure when or why, but sometime early in my tuna casserole production years, I began substituting French’s French Fried Onions for the potato chips. It’s now a necessity. I could no more enjoy tuna casserole without French fried onions than I could enjoy it without onions or celery or tuna or noodles.

It’s a perfect gestalt of sodium, preservatives, msg, calories and the meager Omega 3s that that the tuna provides.

And I’m having it for dinner tonight.

I haven’t cooked for myself in months. And I haven’t cooked for one person  in months. I was surprised I had to think about how to go about making the casserole. This is not a recipe that’s ever been written down.

I managed to do it, but I could easily feed 12 people. I’m going to be eating tuna casserole all week. I suspect that I will, but it remains to be seen, if I will still like my Smells To Heaven Tuna Casserole next week.

I needed a pep talk.

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

I am not a teacher. I work at an emergency shelter for teenagers. I spend up to 8 hours a day with up to 15 teenagers who would like to be anywhere but in the same room with me.

I’ve been losing my religion.

I’ve been worrying about that.

It may, indeed, turn out to be true that I can’t do this much longer, but it’s work worth doing.

We so need miracle workers.

Taylor Mali, the gentleman in the video, is a powerful voice. His words provoke laughter and responsibility – a combination I aspire to.

For at least another day, I can bring myself to tackle teenagers with love and laughter and exhortations to take responsibility for those things they can control.

Broccoli and the Importance of Staying in School

/ wvfurandroot / 5 Comments
What are the odds of finding a photo of broccoli WITH cherries? http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcoveringa/3091439509/sizes/l/

What are the odds of finding a photo of broccoli WITH cherries? http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcoveringa

Back in 1990, my son’s teacher sent him home with a yellow ribbon pinned to his shirt – presumably my 5-year-old son was doing so to proclaim his support of the troops in the Gulf War. Never mind that when I asked him about the ribbon his explanation centered on the fact that the teacher gave it to him and all the kids were wearing them.

I had a melt down.

Now there ain’t nobody on this planet that is more supportive of troops than I am. I believe in a strong military. I just wish we’d quit putting them in situations that endanger them for stupid reasons – morally bankrupt reasons.

So. Small child. Yellow ribbon. School.

I sent him back to school the next day with his ribbon. The ribbon was attached to his shirt with a button emblazoned with “What if Kuwait’s No. 1 Export Was Broccoli?”

The older ones among us will remember George Senior’s statement that he didn’t like broccoli.

That pretty much put an end to my son and the yellow ribbon. [If I’d been a really manipulative parent, I’d have told Chef Boy ‘R Mine that the president didn’t like broccoli. Child of Mine loved “little trees.”]

It goes without saying that I had a rocky relationship with the Cabell County public school system.

Like I said, I support the troops. I do not support the use of small children to make political statements. I don’t like it when protesters, liberal or conservative, drape their kids in witty signs and parade them about the village green. First of all, it’s another case of treating children like property. Instead of putting a bumper sticker on our car, we put them on our kids.

[I maintain that the average school child does not have enough of a knowledge base to understand what the sign on their stroller, backpack, or t-shirt means beyond a superficial level. Therefore, in such situations, we are merely using them as a photo op – cuteness exploited to attract attention. Or, in other words, it’s my kid – I can do what I want. Property.]

Second of all, if I’m not going to slap a slogan on my kid, it’s a given that I’m not going to let some teacher do it.

Yes, indeedy, Cabell County Board of Education and I got off to a rocky start. A teacher once told me that children’s official school files were sometimes labeled with a PP. This code stood for Problem Parent and served to alert teachers that the parent they were about to call might provoke a need for an aspirin, a martini, or early retirement paperwork. I’m pretty sure Chef Boy ‘R Mine’s file had a red PP outlined in glitter. In letters about 6” high.

Some day I’ll tell the story about how a principal with a fraternity paddle was the proverbial straw and how the child of atheist/agnostic/pagan parents ended up Catholic school.

By now, you know where this is going.

Obama is addressing school children with a speech to encourage them to stay in school and study hard. Who could object to that?

As we all know now, plenty of people.

Here’s what I know. If either George had wanted to use school time to talk to my kid, I would have screamed blue bloody murder, slapped a trendy sign on my kid and marched up and down Rt. 60 in protest. At the very least, I would have kept him home. It wouldn’t have mattered if the purpose of said talk was to encourage him to eat cruciferous vegetables or study algebra.

I support the wingnuts’ right to get their panties in a tangle. To do otherwise would be hypocritical. I thought George I and George II were so dangerous and so devious that I wouldn’t put it past them to slip some sort of nonsense into the talk – nonsense that young children do not have the wisdom to identify or parse.

A big bunch of folks feel the same way about Obama. I think my reasons for suspecting the Georges are much more logical and well thought out than the He’s-a-Muslim-Hellbent-On-Killing-Grandma crowd, but that’s neither here nor there.

To do other than support their right to object would make me a hypocrite. I’ve got enough hypocrisy and contradiction in my life as it is. Hopefully, they’ll at least use the opportunity to keep their kids at home and discuss the importance of staying in school. Maybe if they look that contradiction in the eye, they might learn how to spot contradictory statements.

That’s probably hoping for too much.

I leave you with my favorite quote of the week. It comes from Tom Robbins’ masterpiece, Skinny Legs and All, and seems pretty profound at this stage of my life.

Contradiction may be an unavoidable trait in a many-faceted sensibility in an expanding universe, but bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way, and Ellen Cherry was aware that it was her fate to have to struggle against it. Over and over, she reminded herself how fortunate she was to have landed her life in a situation where strange things could happen to it.