Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo, Day 7

This final post of the "Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo" series is doing it R. Kelly style. Yup, it's a remix edition because, well, into everyone's life a little reheated tuna noodle casserole must come.


Trust me, this looks a whole lot better than it did when I first made it back on May 8.

After a week of culinary misadventures and a Sunday spent at home doing laundry, editing drug monographs, hunting down the husband's lost license (didn't find it, so it's a trip to the DMV for him today) and lost passport (did find it in the tub of adoption stuff, so it was a trip down memory lane for us) and listening to the boy yammer on at the top of his lungs (he undoubtedly was born without volume control), I really didn't feel like going all out for supper. However, I still had to take into account the boy's eating preferences, but...well, he's about to head off to school, so he's got to learn to suck it up and deal. And remixed curried tuna noodle casserole with a hint of freezer burn was just the opportunity for him to learn the lesson.

As I mentioned a few sentences back, I first prepared the tuna noodle gloop on May 8, and it was a flop then. The husband and I had found the recipe called for far too little curry powder, so I corrected that with probably at least a teaspoon if not a half-tablespoon of the stuff.

We'd also found the original to be awfully dry. Add to that dryness the freezer burn acquired from spending roughly two months in a chest freezer in a Corelle casserole dish with a slightly torn plastic lid. But that was easily fixed with a fresh can of 98 percent fat-free cream of mushroom soup, two or three tablespoons of milk (skim, of course) and a fourth to a third of a cup of evaporated fat-free milk, which was left over from Saturday's chicken tikka masala (used in place of the heavy cream that recipe calls for). Since I was on a "let's clear out some leftovers" kick, I threw in about a third of a can of tuna that the kiddo hadn't eaten earlier in the week.


Paired with some nuked pappadum and fig-raisin chutney, the remixed curried tuna noodle casserole went over pretty well. I still wound up eating shunned peas, but I was wise enough to put out a "shunned peas" bowl between the boys so they could just remove the oh so offensive little fruits (yes, they're fruit).

Dessert Disaster Revisited
As I've mentioned in a few recent posts, my attempt on Friday to make peppermint ice cream appeared to be a disaster. Since I'm loathe to throw anything out, Saturday night I scooped out from of the concoction, which wound up looking a bit like a Pepto-Bismol Italian ice.


Put it in a kiddie-size rice bowl with monkeys from Japan, and it doesn't look too shabby, non? I guess it just proves that monkeys make everything better.

The peppermint flavor, derived entirely from the two-thirds cup of crushed peppermint candies (or in my case, peppermint ribbon candy from year-end holidays 2007), is pretty strong. The texture reminds me a lot of the vanilla ice milk we used to get in cartons at The Curve every now and then when I was younger. While I doubt I'll revisit this recipe again, I'm relieved that my attempt to make it was a complete and total inedible disaster. No, it was just a little FUBAR--and in this faudie's book, that counts sort of like a tie game in hockey.