A Recipe Only Poppy Cannon Could Love

It's been a rant-rific week here at Chez Boeckman-Walker, so I thought I'd take a break from bitching and complaining to cook something. Not something new, mind you, Gentle Reader, but something that would be a bit of an experiment--a little culinary misadventure if all worked out right (which is to say, if all worked out to be a total f'in disaster).

Revising a Bland Favorite Yet Again
In the third chapter of her book Something From the Oven, Laura Shapiro spends a good length of time discussing Poppy Cannon, who was for a time a sort of maven of that canned goodness cooking many of us have come to associate with those wholesome and Whitey McWhitey years of the 1950s and early 1960s. I'd never heard of Poppy Cannon, and I have to admit I'm a bit in awe of how much she was able to do without a stunning amount of culinary training or expertise. She seems like one of those people who got where she got out of a combination of dumb luck and good timing. She was a largely substance-less talking head long before CNN, MSNBC and Fux allowed people to make a living out of being substance-less mouthpieces. (Or maybe there was more to her success that Shapiro just didn't uncover or choose to include. I dunno.)

Anywho, so Poppy Cannon seems to have been a huge fan of convenience food items and culinary shortcuts without worrying so much about the overall quality of the end product. She wrote a number of cookery books, and her best-known one apparently was The Can Opener Cookbook, which you can probably guess already, Gentle Reader, taught hausfraus trapped in the suburbs and other people living quiet lives of desperation (or so the myth has been perpetuated) how to prepare mock-gourmet meals with canned ingredients. (Can I get a "Viva la cream of mushroom soup!"?) Sure, not all of us have the time or talent to prepare haute cuisine, but...come on, folks! Have you read the label on a can of soup? On a can of anything you could prepare fresh or buy fresh? Frightening stuff there. Trust me.

Anywho, with Poppy Cannon on my mind and in my heart, I dug out the recipe card for curried tuna noodle casserole for Thursday's meal. I've made this recipe once back in May, then fixed up the leftovers in July. Enough time had passed to wipe the memory of those meals from the boys' minds, so why not see how I could muck up the recipe this time, especially by throwing in whatever canned or formerly canned ingredients caught my eye?

Here's the original recipe, which I've only prepared once:

Curried Tuna Noodle Casserole3/4 C green peas
3/4 C sliced green onions
2/3 C chopped red pepper
2 t curry powder
3 T all-purpose flour
1 1/2 C milk
4 C hot, cooked egg noodles
1/4 C chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/2 t NaCl
1 12 oz. can of tuna, drained
1/4 C reduced-fat buttery cracker crumbs (about 7 Ritz crackers)
2 carrots, sliced (optional)
3 celery stalks, chopped (optional)
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
   
2. Prep a nonstick skillet with cooking spray, then warm it over medium heat.
   
3. Once the skillet is ready, saute the peas, onions, bell pepper and curry for 5 min. or until the veggies are tender.
   
4. Put the flour in a small bowl, then gradually add the milk, whisking to combine.
   
5. Add the sauce to the veggies, then bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and allow the veggies to simmer 2 min. or until the sauce has thickened.
   
6. Remove the heat and stir in the noodles, NaCl, parsley and tuna.
   
7. Pour the concoction into a 2-quart casserole dish. Sprinkle with the crumbs.
   
8. Cover and bake 20 min.

Nutritional Info
Calories: 275
Fat: 4.9 g
Sat fat: 1.7 g
Protein: 20.8 g
Carbs: 36.4 g
Fiber: 4.1 g
Cholesterol: 54 mg
Na: 437

I failed to record where I got this recipe. I suspected initially it came from one of my Weight Watchers recipe collections since it just...it's so damn seemingly wholesome and all-'merican that it just screams "I came from a Weight Watchers publication!" However, those options that I recorded make me wonder if I got it from one of the recipe Web sites I visit and jotted down some reviewer recommendations. Hmm. Oh well, I'm too lazy to go dig around and excavate the recipe, and I doubt you care that much about its source, Gentle Reader.

The Faudie's Futzings
Oh boy oh boy, did I ever futz with this recipe! Poppy Cannon, eat your heart out!

• I was too lazy to attempt the roux with the flour and milk, so I got out a can of reduced-fat cream of mushroom soup. Hey, I grew up on tuna noodle casserole made with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. Sure, my can wasn't Campbell's brand, but it was good enough.
  
• I didn't have quite the full amount of green onions the recipe called for, which seems like an awfully large amount to me. I had five or six green onions on hand, so I used them. And I didn't saute them. I don't like my green onions all wilty.
  
• Red bell peppers are too pricey now, so I'd bought a green one (50 cents!) a week or so ago. However, green bells tend not to have any flavor, so I didn't even use it. I instead used about half a small can of diced green chiles that I'd opened last weekend when I made low-fat sour cream chicken enchiladas. I figured, hey, Indian food combines curry powder and green chiles all the time, so why not use them?
  
• I skipped the chopped parsley. I considered throwing in cilantro, but the boy hates cilantro and I didn't need to give him more fuel to refuse to eat this dish since it also contains peas.
  
• Speaking of peas, I used frozen peas and carrots. I have two bags of them in the freezer because the husband used them briefly as ice packs after his surgeries back in November. I hate to let things go to waste.... Plus the carrots added some nice color to the dish.
  
• I had four 5-oz. cans of tuna and a 5-oz. pouch of hickory smoke-flavored tuna that's been hanging out in the pantry for...the FSM knows how long. I truly had every intention of using two cans of tuna, but then I thought about that pouch and thought about my past experiences with flavored tuna in pouches, which isn't great. I mean, the flavor is hardly noticeable, so much so that you might as well be eating plain 'ol tuna. So in an effort to rid my pantry of the space-taking pouch, I threw that in. And discovered quickly that the promised hickory smoke flavor was quite present. And quite a contrast to the curry. Oh joy.
  
• Speaking of the curry powder, I used half a tablespoon. I'd noted on the recipe card after futzing with the leftovers back in July that I could use up to a tablespoon and a half of the powder in order to get some semblance of curry flavor. I didn't want to use that much this time around, and after the addition of the hickory smoke tuna, I was tremendously tempted to stir in more powder. But I didn't. Because....
  
• I didn't drain the one can of tuna I used. The cream of mushroom soup was awfully thick, and I used an entire bag of Ronzoni Whole Wheat Wide Noodles in hopes that the boy would at least get his fill of those, which have 8 grams of protein in a serving. Therefore, I dumped in tuna and spring water in hopes of thinning the soup base and knocking back the hickory smoke flavor a tad. And I'm happy to report that it worked to some degree.
  
• Screw the cracker crumbs, screw the casserole dish, screw baking this sucker. I dumped the goop of veggies, cream of mushroom soup and tuna over the big pot of noodles, tossed to combine, tossed in the green onions, crossed my fingers, said some prayers, made a few offerings and announced supper was ready.

So how did the meal go over, you ask, Gentle Reader? Well, the boys ate it without complaint. The husband said a few times he thought it was quite good (he might have been being kind), and the boy asked for additional servings twice, maybe three times--but he didn't eat his peas or the green onions, but that was totally expected. I have about a serving and a half left over for this weekend, which beats the huge half-casserole I had left over after the first time I made this recipe.

I'm not sure if Poppy Cannon would have approved my half-assed improvising and experimenting. I suspect, though, that she'd be pleased to some degree that someone was thinking of her and her cooking methods nearly 60 years after she published The Can Opener Cookbook. May the FSM bless you wherever you are, dear Poppy!