The tuna casserole that wouldn’t die
Among the many challenges of middle age is the one about cooking for fewer people. Depending on what you consider middle age, I am either new to this and there’s still hope, or such a failure I should just give up and fill the freezer with TV dinners.
All those years I was cooking for four people, I could pretty much predict how much I’d need to put on the table each night. My children remember those as the “chicken and broccoli and brown rice” years, which sounds to me like whining, but it’s probably why they are so healthy. Yes, I cooked some version of that several nights a week, and by the time they were in grade school, I had the portions down to mathematics. Through some equation of hunger-versus-quantity, I was able to send everybody away from the table satiated, leaving clean plates and empty serving bowls.
I probably shouldn’t brag about this. My precision meant there were rarely leftovers in the fridge. Each day I started anew, and so my children grew up without learning to like next-day spaghetti. Or in our case, next-day chicken and broccoli and brown rice. To this day my daughter, who is 17, would rather go hungry than to eat a leftover. For her, a square of lasagna that was made eight hours ago and airlock sealed in Tupperware in the fridge is far beyond its safe date and should be avoided.
There are foods that get better with time, including pot roast, chili and soup. I make a lot, knowing one of us will eat it for lunch the next few days; other dishes are never as good as they are the moment you serve them, including anything with sauce and noodles.
Which brings me to the pan of tuna noodle casserole that’s been hogging the bottom shelf of the fridge for going on a week now. Assembling it became a balancing act, like when you keep adding cereal to the bowl to use up the milk, and then more milk to use up the cereal, and on and on until the whole box of Lucky Charms is toast. With the casserole, first there was too much tuna, so I added more noodles only to find a tuna deficit. I ended up with two large pans of the stuff. For the three of us.
We ate barely half a pan that night for dinner. The rest went into the fridge to await lunch the next day, when I peeled back the foil to see the top noodles had gone all crunchy. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich. The casserole became the main source of calories for the farmer for the next five days.
“I’m almost finished with the tuna stuff,” he said yesterday afternoon, heaving a tired sigh. The tuna is a marathon – or at least a 10K, and he still has a few miles to go.
We try not to waste food. Yes, when I clean the fridge I’ll find a carrot that’s gone rubbery or a shrunken-head apple rolling around the drawer. But the farmer is committed to eating what’s there, a credo that gets challenging after major holidays; even after we’ve downloaded turkey and pie to everyone who will take some (although never my mom’s stuffing, because it’s the first to be gobbled), there’s the salad and all that gravy.
And so I’m riding a steep learning curve. Soon my daughter will be in college and there will be only the two of us here. It’s a sin to waste food, but as my grandmother would say, it’s also wrong to send people away from the table hungry. There’s a happy medium. Now, I have to find it.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.