Creamed Tuna and Peas on Toast (Tuna Optional)

I crack up looking at this picture. I lived here. 

Once upon a time, another lifetime ago, this was my apartment. The door on the left (your left), that was my door and the big window on the left, that was my bedroom. 

Jesus. 

At the time, this was it: this was everything, this was the freakin' best thing ever. It was my first place, and the first time I was completely on my own in the big world (or as big as it got in Dunkirk, NY). 

I lived here and worked two or three jobs and I paid the bills and food shopped and cooked and cleaned. Eventually my boyfriend moved in and together we lived in this dumpy little place on the ground floor with no windows, except for that big picture window that faced the street so the curtains were always drawn.

From Howard Avenue it was a nice walk to the shore of Lake Erie (ironically, years later, when I was heavily into family tree research, I would come to find out my great-uncle Max lived in Dunkirk, on 2nd Street, barely half a mile from my apartment). But one of the best things about Howard Avenue was that it was adjacent to the railroad tracks that served the Norfolk Southern Railway. 

I grew up around trains and I love the sound of them going by. My childhood house in Croton-on-Hudson was clear across town from the Metro North Rail Yard, but you could still hear train whistles echoing around. It's a sound I've always associated with home. And in Dunkirk, trains rolled along the tracks just across the street from my bedroom window, long freight trains trundling through at two in the morning. Some people might find this unbearable. It felt like home to me.

The kitchen was actually pretty good in the apartment. It had no dishwasher, but the landlord had just put in a new stove before I moved in, and it was a gas stove—something I'd never cooked on before. 

What the heck did I cook? I'm sure a lot of split chicken breasts marinated in Italian dressing and baked in the oven. Pasta, naturally. A thousand boxes of pierogies, at least. Salad, scrambled eggs, canned soup and grilled cheese, I'm sure. I remember trying to broil a steak once and it being a smoky disaster.  I remember once splurging on baby lamp chops because I was missing my dad.

And then there was creamed tuna and peas on toast.

This was my boyfriend's contribution to the dinner menu, one of the few things, possibly the only thing he knew how to make. When he first suggested it, I gave him a skeptical look and a lot of teasing. Creamed tuna and peas on toast, what was this, the 1950's? Did he know how to make chipped beef and salmon loaf, too? 

He busied himself at the stove and I stayed out of the way, and when he came over to the couch with two plates balanced on his hands and a triumphant expression, I took my plate and nicely ate it. 

And it was absolutely fabulous. 

I used the last crust of toast to mop up the last bit of cream sauce and handed a pristine plate back to him. "You're making that again," I said, licking my fingers.

He made it often. One memorable time he made it and as we were running toast around the plate rims, he stopped suddenly with a puzzled expression. 

"I didn't put the tuna in," he said.

"What?"

"I just realized I forgot to put the tuna in. This is just creamed peas on toast."

I shrugged and ran my finger across his plate, catching what he'd missed. "It was terrific anyway."

We're in touch on Facebook these days and I asked if he still had the recipe (I could Google it, sure, but what fun is that?). After realizing I was serious, he said he couldn't really remember it anymore, but we went back and forth on the process and I finally figured it couldn't be that different from creamed spinach so I adapted the white sauce from that.

Howard Avenue Creamed Tuna and Peas on Toast

• 1 cup milk
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 2 tbsp half-and-half
• 1 can tuna, drained
• 1 can peas, drained, or equal amount frozen peas, thawed and drained
• 2 slices toast per person

Melt 1 tbsp butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in flour. Cook for 1 minute, whisking constantly.  

Gradually whisk in milk. Whisk another 3 minutes until sauce thickens. Stir in salt, pepper, and half-and-half. Stir in tuna and peas.

Put toast slices on plate and ladle tuna mixture over. 

Best eaten with a lover on the living room couch while watching TV, or standing over the kitchen sink, staring into space, remembering a lover.

Photo is courtesy of A Good Appetite, who takes their recipe for CT&POT up several notches by preparing it with bacon, pearl onions and thyme. I suppose you could even marry this to a tuna melt and add cheese to the white sauce as well.  Experiment with the bread, too: an artisan, multi-grain boule would be dynamite.

Clean your plate, dear.

Nonna's Stuffing

My great-grandmother Teresa Pizzamiglio (Nonna) immigrated to the US in 1913 with her husband, Angelo Danese. She was a superb cook, and a master gardener. What she was not was generous with her recipes and techniques, nor was she patient with teaching either. My grandmother, Lena Danese (Giggi), was not allowed in the kitchen as a young girl, so it's something of a miracle that she ended up as wonderful a cook as she was. To the kitchen, she took the exact opposite approach, letting my mother and her sister experiment wildly and make a mess. She could entertain both lavishly (the family backyard clambakes were renowned) and humbly (serving BLTs for dinner and calling it a night). It is from her that my mother learned to make a festa out of niente, and it is the gift that's been passed down to me.

I remember most holiday feasts being at Giggi's house in Syracuse, and always on Thanksgiving and Christmas was served Nonna's Stuffing. I don't know if Nonna created this dish herself, or copied something that was served in Italy. I don't know how, if she was indeed so parsimonious with her cooking knowledge, Giggi got the recipe out of her. But somehow she did and she made it, and my mother and my aunt made it, and now I make it and my cousins make it. This year, Panda helped me make it. It was very interesting watching her because right up until I was her age, I turned up my nose at Nonna's stuffing. So did my brother and my cousins. It was weird looking. It was green. All the adults raved about it so it had to be awful. But right around 11 or 12 years of age, we started coming around. We would verify that it would be served, "You're making Nonna's stuffing, right?" To which the adult in charge that year would look at us as if we were witless, "Of course!"

This year, Panda was sneaking bites right and left. And so another sheep is brought into the Pizzamiglio-Danese fold, and I will tuck this recipe into her little Hope Chest, and I have dreams of sitting at her table one day when she brings out the pan of Nonna's stuffing with a mixture of pride and trepidation, "I hope it came out right..."

There is no other stuffing but this.

Nonna's Stuffing

• 2 lbs sweet Italian sausage
• 1 1/2 - 2 lbs Italian bread, shredded into small pieces
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup fresh chopped parsley
• 2 tablespoons each fresh chopped sage and rosemary
• 1 1/2 cups Parmesan or Asiago cheese (Nonno imported Asiago cheese so that's what we use)
• 6 bags (you heard me) baby spinach
• Salt, pepper, and Bell's poultry seasoning to taste

I do this all in a particular order and the prep time takes longer than the actual cooking.

First I have to find the recipe which always causes a small panic attack. The past couple years I've been very careful to put it back in the pages of the Martha Stewart Cookbook. The recipe itself, as you can see, has gone through several annotations over the years. I don't like making a clean copy because all those scribbled notes are just so wonderful.

This is made in the 20-million-gallon size Madame Le Creuset pot. Hold your applause.

Prepping the bread is the worst part. I hate it, there's no good way to do it. I get 2 1-lb loaves from the store, tear one apart with my hands, crust and all, and then the other loaf I sort of peel away the crust and then shred up the soft insides. I always stress that there's too much bread so I put some in Madame and then have a separate holding tank. Whatever I don't use goes to the birds.

Prep everything: chop the onions, celery and garlic and have that in one bowl. Chop your herbs and have that ready. Grate the cheese, or get a small child to do it, put that aside.

Squeeze the sausage out of its casings and brown well in the largest skillet you have. Good luck getting a small child to help with the squeezing without making any poop jokes. As the sausage browns, crumble with the side of a wooden spoon. I hate this. I don't know why, but standing by the pan, breaking up clumps of sausage makes me want to scream.

This year I got the brilliant idea of using my pastry cutter to do this job and I will never again use the spoon.

When the sausage is done, dump it into a colandar in the sink to drain well, you can even rinse it if you wish. Do not wipe out the pan.

In the same pan you fried the sausage, with the drippings still there, saute the onion, celery and garlic about five minutes or until translucent. Add the fresh herbs and saute another 2-3 minutes. Scrape all this into the pot with the bread, and put the pan back on the stove and add a little olive oil.

One at a time, saute each bag of baby spinach. I know 6 bags seems like a lot and every year I think it's a lot, it's too much, it's crazy. But every year each bag wilts down into a pathetic lump and then I panic that it's not enough. It's enough, just go with it. As each batch is done, put it in the colander in the sink and press out as much juice as possible, then put into the pot with the bread and vegetables.

Now you can turn off the heat, finally. Add the sausage and cheese to the pot and mix well. Use a big spoon or your hands. Now taste. You can add salt, pepper (I like 1/2 teaspoon of white pepper) and Bell's poultry seasoning as needed. But the best way to really see if you have it right it to take a little stuffing, make a small patty, and fry it up. And then make another because you are the cook. This year during the tasting phase, I found the stuffing had far too many savory notes, something wasn't right. So I chopped up another onion and 2 ribs of celery, sauteed them quick, mixed it in and that did the trick —it needed that extra bit of bright sweetness. Every year it's different.

Pat into your baking dish. I always make a regular 9x13 dish to serve, and then there's another 9x9 pan for my brother. At this point you could wrap the dish in foil and freeze it until show time. Otherwise it goes into a 350 oven for an hour.

Grazie, Nonna.

Steve's Pasghetti Pie

This is really Clara's Spaghetti pie:  my grandmother's recipe, passed to my Aunt Evelyn, who gave it to my mom, who gave it to me. I now give it to you.  

My brother Steve adores this. It can be an appetizer, it can be the main dish with a salad, or it can be a side for soup. It tastes good hot, room temperature, or cold right out of the fridge at 2AM. And as we discovered last night, it's divine with a smear of leftover pesto.

In the recipe below, the last 3 ingredients are not Clara's. They are my own tinkering, which is what you're supposed to do with a family recipe. You all get together and something like this is served and everyone knows Cousin Jane makes spaghetti pie with extra onions. Aunt Ethel uses raw onions, not fried. Aunt Mary puts in raisins. Aunt Betty leaves out the salt because of Uncle Jack's high blood pressure so nobody really likes Aunt Betty's spaghetti pie.

But everyone loves Clara's.

Clara's Spaghetti Pie

• 1 pound spaghetti
• 1-2 large onions, diced (originally 1, I like a lot so I use 2, and I like using a mix of yellow and red onion)
• 4 large eggs
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/3 cup parmesan cheese
• fresh ground pepper

Pick a large frying pan with a handle but not too high sides. My largest one does have high sides which makes sliding the pie in and out a little tricky.

Fry the diced onion in olive oil. Do not be stingy with the oil (hey, I'm just repeating the directions, Grandma said don't be stingy!) The onions should brown on the edges.

Take the pan off the heat and put the onions in a large bowl to cool down.

Meanwhile cook 1 pound of spaghetti and generously salt the water. You will not be adding salt later on so you want the water a little more seasoned. Cook the paste until just al dente. It will cook more once you put it in the frying pan.

Drain the pasta and rinse with very cold water. Drain thoroughly again.

In a medium bowl, beat 4 eggs with the parsley, parmesan cheese, and 3 or 4 grinds of the pepper mill. Add the cooked spaghetti to the large bowl with the onions, pour the egg mixture over all and combine well.

In your pan there should be some oil left from frying the onions, but add more if it seems too dry and put on medium-high heat until shimmering. Dump in spaghetti-egg mixture and smooth out to fill the pan. Turn heat down to medium and cook until nice and brown on the bottom. Every now and again take your spatula and run it around the edges and a little bit underneath.

Slide the pie onto a large plate cooked side down.

Call your brother and tell him you made spaghetti pie and he should leave now.

Now the tricky part: hold the plate in one hand like a tray, take the frying pan with your other hand and invert the frying pan over the pie. Keep your hand on the bottom of the plate and push up. Hold on tight to the handle and keep pressure down. 1-2-3, turn the whole operation over. Now the uncooked part of the pie will be down in the frying pan and ready to brown.

It usually takes 5 to 7 minutes per side to brown well (enough time for your brother to drive over).

Slide onto large plate or platter (I like to use my big wooden cutting board) and cut into wedges, reserving at least half for your brother.

My mom says spaghetti pie can be frozen in foil and warmed up in the oven (it should be thawed first). However I cannot attest to this because I have never seen leftover spaghetti pie in my life.

Madame von Meatball: How it All Began

Holy schmidt, I found my old recipe book.

Does everyone have something like this at one point or another? A notebook or composition book with recipes torn from magazines and newspapers, some pasted or taped in, some loose? This was mine. I'm looking through the pages as if looking through an old yearbook.

Oh my God, the eggplant rollatini. I made this dish for the first time when Jeeps and I were dating, at his parents house in Ridgefield. I laugh to think about this now. I just went over with a grocery bag of ingredients and the recipe torn out of Redbook magazine, took over their kitchen and made dinner one night. Thank God my future in-laws were such groovy people. I really need to make this again...

*Gasp* The nectarine-kiwi tart! I never made this but I had aspirations to. I mean look at it, is that not divine?

And then, from myriad of clippings tucked between the pages, I found this:

This, my friends, is what I wrote down one day in the spring of 2001, when my mother came over to my house in Croton Falls to teach me how to make meatballs.

We were a wreck.

Not because of anything bad between us. We were just on shaky ground. Two years prior, we had closed the dance school my mother had run for over 30 years, the school where I had grown up, and where I had taught with her for 9 years. We lived, ate, drank and breathed the school. I'm sure it wasn't all we talked about, but it seemed like it was all we talked about. 

Now, suddenly, our common thread was tied off and clipped. Suddenly there were awkward silences between us. I felt like I had to get to know my mother all over again, and she me.

I was also in the grip of serious post-partum depression. I was twelve pounds underweight, fighting terrible anxiety attacks, trying to deal with going back to work, trying to figure out motherhood as well as daughterhood.

My mother came over to cook. I know she was upset and scared for me, but she was so gentle. She didn't offer advice, she didn't try to fix it. She just came over to cook.  

We made meatballs in gravy. I think we may have even made spanikopita that day, too, but I mostly remember making meatballs. 

I remember asking her, for the first time, "Did you want to have a lot of children?" (There is just my brother and me, but I wondered what her vision of a family had been when she was young). I remember her drinking a cup of coffee and furrowing her brow before she responded, as if this was the first time anybody had asked her. We talked about children. We talked about mothers. We talked about food. Together, stumbling, we began the steps of a new dance.

It was the day my mother began to become my friend.

I make meatballs by rote and instinct now. I don't need these pieces of paper anymore. But I'm going to keep them forever because they are more, so much more than a recipe.