Tuna noodle casserole

It's a retro, mid-century mom classic

If you need a lot of hearty food that you don't have to fuss over, you can't go wrong with a tuna noodle casserole. And honestly you could skip the tuna. This particular recipe is distantly descended from a Martha Stewart recipe my wife was trying one day and we were like, wait, this is not gonna taste like anything, so we started jazzing it up. And I'm doing it as a one-pan meal. A big, stove-safe baking dish, or any big oven-safe pan. A whole stick of butter, 113g, or you could use half a cup of olive oil, 120mL. I'm just melting that over moderate heat.

Maybe give it a little help so that the melted part doesn't burn before the rest is liquified. Now I'll whisk in half a cup of all-purpose flour, 60g, to make a roux. It might seem like too much flour at first, but a roux loosens up as cooks, I don't know why. Whisk it smooth and then keep whisking as it cooks for a couple minutes, just to get the raw flour taste out and maybe develop a few little nutty flavor notes. I see it just starting to turn brown, it smells cooked, that's enough. Time to start whisking in a whole quart of milk, which is just over a liter — a little bit at a time, especially early on when we're whisking out the lumps. You could use a non-dairy milk, you could use some veggie stock, plain water, it'd be fine. Yes I'm showing you this entire assembly in one shot so you can see how dead-simple this recipe is.

If you were to dump the liquid in all at once, you would loose the viscosity that you need to whisk the lumps out. The lumps would just bob around in a pool of milk. Once you've got the lumps out, you can pour a lot more aggressively. The wheat starch will gelatinize and thicken as that comes up to a simmer and we will have béchamel sauce. Now, green beans. You always want to snip off the stem end. The stem is totally un-chewable. But I leave the flower end – that doesn't bother me.

I'm gonna grab a handful of green beans at a time — hold on, let me stir that sauce. It's so thick, the bottom layer could burn. Let's turn the heat all the way down — we just need a bare simmer. Anyway, green beans in parallel alignment and I will cut them into chunks at an extreme angle — makes them look a little prettier. I am doing a whole pound of green beans, 454g. Some classic casseroles are based on green beans instead of noodles. I'm basically doing half noodles, half green beans, which should result in a nutritionally superior product, for me. Those need a little head start, a little pre-cooking, so I'll stir them in and let them simmer.

That sauce looks way too thick now, but tons of water is gonna come out of the vegetables. I've got this mostly sweet red pepper from the garden. I'll cut that in half, take the seeds out and slice it into strips.

You could use a regular bell pepper instead.

In those go. And you could use a second bell pepper, as Martha does, but I'm using a handful of red chilies. I think these are Fresnos, which are not very hot. But if you want to control the heat somewhat more, one thing you can do is slice them into rounds, pick them up and then just push out the seeds and ribs, where most of the heat is.

You'll only have to do that from the slices up near the stem. The other rounds will be empty. Gather those up, and then you can kinda shake out some more seeds. Throw those in, stir in the peppers so they can get a little head start on softening. I'll get rid of all those seeds. Now I've got a couple bunches of green onions here, but any form of onion would work as long as you slice it thin. I'll peel off any tattered or slimy outer layers. Some of these are noticeably sandy on the inside.

That'll happen — they grew up through dirt — yet another reason to peel off those outer layers. I'll give these one more rinse in the sink. OK, cut the roots off and discard. Then slice thin, all the way up through the whites and into the greens. I'll just stop when I get to the very top where they're super dry and stringy. All of those go in, stir stir, make sure the sauce at the bottom isn't burning. Here's a great trick that I do owe to Martha — canned, marinaded artichokes. Usually they're baby artichokes, which is why you can eat the whole thing, not just the heart.

These bring a ton of flavor to casseroles, if you can get the lid off. I'm embarrassing myself. Oh you know, our friends at the National Center for Home Food Preservation gave me one of these thingies for gripping lids. Nice. Martha says to drain the marinade off. I see no reason to not just dump it all in there. Now it's tuna time. I've got four of these standard five-ounce cans, 140g each.

I'll dump all of these in — again, I see no reason to drain them. We need liquid, we need flavor — put it all in.

If you don't eat fish, maybe some

Jars of marinated mushrooms instead? once the tuna is in you don't want to over-stir, because you could end up shredding the meat too fine.

So I'll put in some seasonings before

I stir again. A ton of garlic powder makes a casserole really taste like something.

A little less onion powder. A little dried thyme or other herb, maybe some mustard powder. Grind in a lot of pepper. And then a big pinch of salt to start with. We'll probably need more, but the tuna is salty, the artichokes are salty, so it's good to be conservative. Give that an initial stirring. And now it's time for 12 ounces, 340g of dried egg noodles — Manischewitz is the best. And lots of people pre-boil them but you can just dump them right in.

I'll stir them in. We've got some excessively large chunks of tuna still, but they will keep breaking apart as we stir. Here's the trick to making baked noodle dishes without pre-boiling: get it so that the texture looks right, except for the fact that the noodles are dry. This is about the sauce texture I want in the end. Get everything tossed in enough thick sauce, and then top it off with enough wine, or stock, or plain water to just cover. All of that will get absorbed by the noodles. Yes, I'm doing a whole bottle of cheap pinot grigio. You could use half wine, half water if you want it less acidic.

You could use all water with a big glug or two of white balsamic vinegar to replicate the taste of wine without alcohol. Just get enough watery liquid in there to barely cover. I need a little more, so a little water. Stir stir. Now, I'll get a spoonful of that liquid and taste for seasoning. Tastes pretty good by itself but it's gonna need more salt — a lot more. All the flavor is gonna be diluted by the noodles and the other bland bulk in there, so the sauce should taste too salty at this stage — a little too salty. Push all those noodles down so they get cooked.

And lastly you can grate on any hard cheese — this is pecorino. This will brown nicely in the last phase of cooking. And that's it — cover tightly with foil to trap steam and get all the noodles cooked. Bake at 400ºF/200ºC until the noodles are soft and it seems like most of the water is absorbed. That'll be 45 minutes, an hour max. Then throw it back in uncovered to evaporate any remaining free water and to let the top get all brown and crunchy, another 20 minutes or so. Yeah, it takes a long time to bake, especially if you don't boil the noodles first but you can bake it the night before and just reheat it when you get home from work. Or you can underbake it a little bit and then freeze it.

There's a reason everybody brings casseroles to people who are sick or they just had a baby or something.