Not Your Grandma’s Tuna Casserole, and a Blueberry Crisp

Tuna casserole, made with homemade cream of mushroom soup, sweet peppers, peas, mushrooms, canned tuna, and egg noodles, then topped with panko bread crumbs and baked until golden brown. Freshly baked blueberry crisp with fresh blueberries and a delicious oat crumb. Prepared a sourdough Focaccia for the next meal and a cinnamon apple sourdough loaf for the next day.

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#tunacasserole #blueberrycrisp #sourdough

Hi everyone, Elsie Jensen here. Today we are going to make some old school tuna casserole, but of course I’m going to jazz it up a little bit. Um, and then a blueberry crisp. And then we’ve got um three kind of breads that we need to prep up. We’re going to prep up a traditional sourdough loaf. We’re going to prep up some sourdough fkaca for dinner tonight. And then we’re going to prep up an apple cinnamon sourdough loaf as well. So let’s start with our tuna casserole here. Um, I have a friend who’s in hospice care and this is what she requested. So, I’m happy to make it. I haven’t made this in a very long time. So, we’re going to torch jazz up a little. But, I’m going to put in a whole pound of egg noodles. You got to use egg noodles for this. I think that just gives you that classic casserole bake type um dish for this. And then I’m just going to give it a Let me get my pasta stir. But I’m going to give it a little stir. We’re not going to cook these until they’re completely done. You’re going to just cook them for about five minutes. They’re going to soak up a little bit more liquid um in the bake when we bake it up. So, I’m going to check my watch and then we’ll take these out in about 4 minutes. While we’re waiting for those to boil up, we’re going to prepare our blueberry crisp so it can start baking in the oven. So, I’m going to start by putting in about two tablespoons of butter in my little um kind of this is a risado, like a lacerate risotto pot, but a little Dutch oven. And we’re going to let that start to melt. And then I have about a little less than a pound of fresh blueberries um in there because the kids stole some out. But we’re just we’re using a good amount of our fresh blueberries to make the base of our blueberry crisp here. And we’re going to add to the blueberries to kind of sweeten it up. We’re going to add about a half a cup of sugar because again our crisp topping will have lots of flavor in it. Sugar. So we don’t want to take the make the bottom part too sweet. So we’re going to add in about a half a cup of granulated sugar. And then I have um a fresh lemon here and we’re going to cut it up and squeeze half of our juice from our lemon. Forgot. There we go. Doing the tango back and forth here. So just some juice from this is going to add just a nice kind of tartness. It’ll bring that little tartness out from the blueberries in here. And then we’ll add a little bit of vanilla as well, which will kind of mellow these flavors out. Let’s grab that seed. But we’re going to again just juice from about a half a lemon, which is probably going to be around a teaspoon and a half of juice, depending on how uh you juicy your lemon is. Now, I finally picked up some new vanilla. I’ve got the big bottle. We’re going to add in about a half a teaspoon of vanilla to this as well. And that’s just going to mellow out some of that flavor. So you’ll you’ll have the lemon to bring out a little bit of that tartness, but then this will give a nice kind of, you know, mellow taste to it. But unlike a peach or a apple crisp, I’m not going to add any cinnamon to it. So I kind of like to keep it plain for this. And we’re going to let these come to a nice boil um until they’re kind of started all popping and their juices are coming out. Um then we’ll add in a little bit of cornstarch to thicken it up. But while we’re waiting for that to come to a boil here, we are going to prep up our crumb topping to go on it. So, let me grab my brown sugar here because we’re going to mix this in first. So, we’re going to start with a half a cup of melted butter, which is the same as one stick and add it all in here. Just going to use this to scrape it all out. And then we’re going to add in a half a cup of brown sugar. Make sure it’s firmly packed. We’re going to mix those together. And then we’ll add in a half a cup of oats and a half a teaspoon of salt. and a half a teaspoon of baking powder. And then we’ll add in our flour. So, we’ve first got our brown sugar in here. And this is going to give you that just rich flavor on the crumble um for the crisp. It’ll just be so delicious. That brown um sugar just makes all the difference. Okay, we’ve got that in here. Now, we’re going to add in a half a cup of oats. You’re going to want to use old-fashioned oats for this. Um that will just kind of help keep their texture and shape in um this dessert. And we’re going to want a half a cup. And then I am going to pour out my noodles now cuz it’s been just about 5 minutes. And again, you don’t want to overcook them and you don’t want to cook them until they’re done. You want to put them about two to three minutes less than their kind of cook time because they’re going to cook longer in the oven and soak up the juices of the tuna casserole. So, I’m just going to pour these in right now. There we go. Kind of done with that. We’ll let them sit over there. Um and then we’ll uh bring them back when it’s time for it. Let me get our blueberries stirring here because you can see our sugar is starting to already dissolve and those juices from those blueberries are starting to come out. And put that butter down. That little bit of butter is going to be really important for the cornstarch and making sure that it just gets this nice little kind of jelly texture to it. Um, a little bit of fat just I think makes the cornstarch turn out a little bit better. Okay, we’ve got our oats or half a cup of oats in here. Now, we’re going to add in a half a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of baking powder. That baking powder is going to give this little puff in our um our rise for our crumb on our crisp topping. That is just delicious. So, I want to do it. And we’re going to use a half a teaspoon We’re going to mix this up and then we’ll add in our flour. And we’re going to add about 34 of a cup of flour. It might be a couple tablespoons more. Um because we want it to be just about the right crumbliness. We don’t want it too wet because then it it won’t have the right bakeup texture. Let’s get our blueberries stirring here. We want them to sweat out their juices, but I don’t want them necessarily to completely pop um yet. I want some of them to um that way they kind of you’ll still have your blueberry texture here. So, we’re going to do about 34 of a cup of flour for this. And then we’re going to mix it and kind of crumble together. I might add a little bit more because again, I always look at the texture of my crumb and see versus the exact measurements. So, if it’s too wet, then I’ll want to add just a smidge more. So, yeah, this one’s a bit it’s a little bit wet, so I’m going to add just a bit more. But add it in slowly because it doesn’t take a lot of flour to bring that crumb out. Especially since the liquid is just about um you know butter in here. So we’ll add in I added about add another tablespoon here. And then kind of getting it together here. It’s starting to kind of clump apart. There we go. So, it’s kind of I’m looking for it where it crumbles apart. So, you’ll have some big chunks, but they’re not completely stuck together. That’s going to give you just like the perfect little bake up. If you don’t add enough flour, then you’re going to have more of a soggy crisp. Just a smidge more. There we go. Okay, this is exactly what I want. So, we’ve got again those big crumbs. Um, and then some little ones to it. And also, you don’t want it to be too dry because then it will be a really crumbly crumb topping. Okay, look at here. You see how just quickly our blueberries are starting to sweat it out? They’re going to be ready in just about a second. So, while we’re waiting for this to kind of um bubble up, let’s prep our um peppers to go in for our tuna casserole. We’re going to have peppers, mushrooms, um and peas as the vegetables in our tuna casserole. No onions cuz um my friend can’t have onions right now. So, we’re just keeping it basic. And I’m I’m jazzing it up. So, it’s not exactly your grandmother’s tuna casserole. If you ever had them, I remember eating tuna casserole um a lot at the like child care I went to growing up. Uh Mrs. Robinson made tuna casserole a lot. Um but I’m going to make it a little bit more jazzy, a little nicer. I’m going to make my own cream of mushroom soup. So, I already think that instantly is going to make it, you know, better because homemade cream of mushroom soup is just so delicious. Okay, let’s get our pepper sauteed up here. I’m going to kind of chop them in half and then make a nice little, you know, thing cuz I don’t want them too big um in there uh because I don’t want their texture to take away too much from it because it is more of a softer casserole. There we go. But I think the peppers will just add a really nice flavor to this. There we go. And then we’ll start sautéing them in some olive oil. And then we’ll add then we’ll do our mushrooms next. But peppers are going to go first because they’re a bit firmer and so they need a little bit longer to cook up. Then we’ll do our mushrooms. Okay, let’s add in about 2 tablespoon of olive oil or so, maybe one and a half. And this is again going to be we’re going to work on the um veggie base for our tuna casserole. Okay. And then our blueberries are popping over here. So, we are just about ready for them. There we go. So you see we’ve got this nice kind of juice forming on our blueberries. Now this is lovely, but we don’t want it to be too soupy. So I always add in a little bit of corn starch and essentially making like a slurry that will thicken it up. And this will just create such a delicious kind of jelly texture um with the crisp. It makes it to where it’s not watery. So I’m just going to kind of shake it over. We’re going to use probably about a tablespoon. I shake a little bit and then we’re going to mix it in. There we go. So, I don’t just like spoon it in because then it’s not going to dissolve well. It’ll just have like little, you know, cornstarch dumplings in there. So, just, you know, again, dust it over the top. We’re going to want about a tablespoon. There we go. Beautiful. And you want to do this with your really juicy fruits like blueberries, blackberries, strawberries because they let out a lot of juice and then they’ll uh what will happen is they will be runny and it’ll make more for a soggy crisp. Okay, I’m going to turn off my stove here. And since this is going to be going to my friends, we’re going to be putting it. right over here in a little mini loaf pan for this. That way they’ll have it. And just take this. We’re going to give our peppers a little stir here. I’m going to turn this down to about a four. So just like a medium while we’re doing this. Okay. So I’m going to pour in my blueberry base. Pour it. And you can see it kind of covers about I want to say a third of the way here of our little loaf pan. And I’m making sure I get all this delicious, you know, blueberry gel off on there cuz that’s just going to add so much flavor. [Music] And now we’re going to take our crumb topping that we made and we’re going to evenly sprinkle this over the top of it. And again, we used um a half a teaspoon of baking powder in here. So, that is going to, you know, kind of react with the blueberry juices and that gel, and it’s going to create cause the uh crumb to kind of puff up almost like a little bit like a cake. Um which just gives it a little bit more body in here and helps it kind of absorb up those natural liquids. There we go. I’ve been making a lot of crisp this summer and I just feel like, you know, it’s such a I feel it’s such a summer food or picnic food. Um, in there, you know, so we did a mango crisp, we did our peach crisp, we did a blackberry one, a strawberry one. So, there’s a couple more I want to make. There we go. So, we’ve got our crumb topping on here, and I’m going to put this in the oven at 350. And we’ll let this kind of bake up at 350 um for this. Now, when I put my tuna casserole in, I’m going to move this down to the bottom. And uh we’ll raise the temperature of our oven up. But for now, we’ll just put it on here. And this takes about 25 minutes to cook up. So, I’m going to set my timer. So I’ll know when the tuna casserole and because since I’m going to raise the heat up, I’m going to reduce a little bit of that time for that. But I’m going to make sure it’s directly under the tuna casserole not to give it as much direct heat. Okay, let me slide this over. I’m going to wash my hands real quick. Got a little bit of that crumb topping. And let’s get our mushrooms kind of prepped up for our tuna casserole base. So, we got our peppers here. I’ve got about a pound of baby bellas because again, I want to make my own kind of cream of mushroom soup with this. Now, at if, um, we weren’t, you know, uh, keeping the onions out for dietary restriction, I would say add a yellow onion, dice it up, um, and then sauté it first and then add in the peppers uh, for it. You could also omit any of the vegetables if you don’t like them. So, peppers don’t have to be in there. There’s something that you can add. So, there’s a couple other vegetables you can do that add great flavor. You could always do a little bit of um diced celery, um spinach, always, you know, green beans. Those all can kind of go in there and work well with this. We go. And we’ll get our mushrooms sautéing up here. I want to really bring out their flavors because we’re going to be using that to make kind of our cream of mushroom soup. You have a question. Would this recipe work with chicken? Yep, you could definitely do it with chicken. Um, you know, it’s one of those things where you could actually really like kind of change the protein around with a lot of, you know, different things. You could do an Italian sausage. it would kind of change the little flavor profile of it, but it would give you that just kind of nice flavor. You could even do like a smoked sausage and cut up in here. Um because I know that tuna isn’t everybody’s like cup of tea. Um so yes, you could definitely change it around. I’m just going to add a little bit more oil in here. Actually, I’m going to add Yeah, we’ll do a little oil. Um, just because mushrooms are very porous and they’re going to soak it up really fast and I want to make sure I have enough on it to get this nice kind of crisp on it. Lost the pepper. There we go. So, I’m just going to spread those mushrooms out. And I’m going to turn up my temperature now to about a six. I want it a little bit higher for the mushrooms um so that they get their flavor out um for our kind of cream of mushroom soup that we’re going to do. Let me roll up my sleeves cuz they’re going to rolling down. It’s like my favorite sweatshirt, but it is super loose. Let’s get While we’re waiting um for the uh mushrooms to kind of sauté, we’re going to get our panko breadrumbs um kind of uh seasoned up here. We need about a cup, a little more than a cup of panko breadrumbs. And this is going to go over the top of our um so there’s about a cup. We’ll just add a little bit more. Um this is going to go over the top of our casserole. It’s going to give it a little crunch. But there are so many different variations that you could do. You could do crispy onion strings kind of like a green bean casserole. Potato chips apparently has been a people love it. Or if you have stale potato chips, you crunch them up and you add them on there and they add like a great flavor as well. But we’re just sticking with the classic bread crumbs here. And then I’m going to use a little bit of parmesan. We’re going to reach in there, grab about a This is going to be about by the time I’m done crushing it up, it’s going to be like about about a tablespoon or so. And we’re just going to crush it up. You could also use already shredded parmesan, but I always have the flakes because I prefer the flakes. But it’s about two one to two tablespoons of parmesan. And we’re going to put it in here. And it’s just going to add a a little extra crunch to it. Parmesan is one of those sheets that crisps up really nice when you bake it. And we’re going to add in some oil. We need about two tablespoons of oil here. Um, and I’m just gonna lightly drizzle it over so I can kind of see it because that’s going to allow it to kind of really crisp up on the top of our um, things. Well, we’ll mix those up. Let me get a spoon or really I’ll get a fork to toss it. And we’re just kind of mixing it. It might actually work better with my fingers. So, I’m just going to mix it until that oil is kind of coating all of those. And this is again going to help it kind of really crisp up on the top of our uh tuna casserole, which will just add a nice flavor. Now, you could also use seasoned if you wanted to. Um the Parmesan cheese in here is going to give it a little bit of a seasoning as well. Okay, let’s check these mushrooms out. There we go. We’re starting to get a nice little sear on them. See, we’ve got a couple of this beautiful golden brown coloring on it, which will be perfect. So, I’m just essentially taking like an old school recipe and just making it a little bit fresher. It’s like my green bean casserole that I make. I don’t use canned green beans in it. I don’t use prepackaged crispy onions. And I always make everything from scratch. And I think it can take a dish that a lot of people are like h and elevate it to make it a lot nicer. And this is where homemade cream of mushroom soup will just make this a lot nicer. Let me grab my butter over here because we’re going to be using this to kind of make the base like a rue base almost for our cream of mushroom soup. We’re going to be using four cans of tuna. So, these are um 5 oz cans. And when you drain them, they’ll be 4 oz. So, let me grab a bowl here for this since we’re going to have to drain them. Now, I like mine to use mine in water instead of oil because I think it makes it less heavy of a a casserole versus if you do the tuna in oil, it’s a bit more greasy. So, I do packed in water. Um, and you don’t need to for a tuna casserole, you don’t need to go fancy with your tuna. You can just kind of keep it We’re losing part of our There we go. You can just keep it your, you know, chunk light or whatever. Um, you know, only for like salads would you’re going to really use a fancy like uh canned tuna for it. Let’s get these drained. But make sure you you drain them because if you have too much liquid, again, you’ll get to a more mushy casserole um versus a delicious casserole. They always make these in such little cans. I know the just the other day, it was so funny. I bought actually tuna because I was like, gosh, you know, I haven’t made a tuna melt in forever and I’ve been kind of craving one. And that might be on my next line. I got to make I was like waiting till my kids go off um you know back to school because they do not like tuna or the smell of tuna and I think it’s so delicious. My husband does not. There we go. Get our last one kind of strained here. And so we just kind of have our juices out of here so that um we’re not going to make it too mushy. Let’s get these mushrooms kind of stirred. We should be starting to get this nice Yeah. Good. We’re all getting these lovely kind of brown edges on them. So again, perfect. You want to make sure you get enough kind of cook time on the mushrooms. Um so you want them to be tender before you start making kind of your r base. um and changing them up a little bit. So, I’m going to add in about I want to say two two and a half tablespoons of butter here. And butter is what’s going to really thicken this up nicely versus using oil. Now, you can just use oil um to do it, but the butter, I think, gives you just that that nicer flavor and texture. Okay, we’re going to let this melt and then we’re going to sprinkle some flour over this to thicken it up. And then we’ll be adding in I’m going to do vegetable broth and um cream for this. So, I’ll use some vegetable bullion, but you can use chicken bullion um for it as well. And I like to use the bullion over the uh like a chicken broth or a vegetable broth because I feel like it doesn’t have quite as much flavor than if you uh use the bullion. You can use a little bit more to bring out a lot more flavor. So, a big heaping spoonful. I’m just using up the rest of this. This is probably about a tablespoon or so. Um maybe a a smidge more, but it just packs a better punch of flavor. And I’m going to be using this in replace of adding kind of salt into my um casserole. We might use a little bit of salt towards the end um just for taste, but with using the bullion over a broth, you don’t need to add that much salt, if any. There we go. So, now that my butter is nice and melted, let’s get our flour. And we’re going to sprinkle our flour over the top. I’m going to use probably about a table two tablespoons in here, maybe a little bit more. I’m going to look at it um first to see as we mix it up. But again, we’re making kind of the rue base for our cream of mushroom soup part of our tuna casserole. So, we’re going to mix this up. Again, I’m going for about two to three tablespoons, which I’m just visually measuring here, but I want to kind of coat them until we have just this nice kind of little powdery, you know, you know, thick little broth over it. There we go. And this is going to add in a lot of flavor. And what we’re going to do is I’m going to add slowly add in my broth for this um until it’s thick enough. I’m going to add just a smidge more flour. I’ve got about a teaspoon left in here. So, we’ll just use the rest of that. I will say I always have a little container of flour out on my counters for when I’m cooking so I don’t always have to get my big tub out. And I will say I love it. It makes it a little bit easier when you’re like, “Oh, I just need a pinch of that flour.” I have one for sugar and salt and pepper. Okay, perfect. So, now you see we’ve got them. They’re kind of thick, kind of kind of a thick coating on them. We’re going to add in our vegetable broth and we’re going to add in our cream. We’re going to add in a little bit at a time cuz again, we don’t want it to um you know, get completely drenched up yet. There we go. And I have mine cooking over, you know, I’m got it on a two, but I’m going to turn it up to about a four, four and a half right now. You see how we’re adding this in here, and it’s already just starting to thicken up nicely. Add a little bit more. Little by little. And I’m going to again bring my maybe a little higher because I want it to come to a low um boil right now. There we go. And I’m making sure I’m de like kind of glazing the bottom of my pan where we have those vegetables um sautéing in there so that they kind of bring up some just nice flavors um that anything that got stuck on there while cooking. You have a question. What size pan is that? This is a six quart sauté pan by AllClad. So, it’s really it’s nice. It’s big. I love it because I’ll be able to throw my noodles and everything and toss it in here and then I’m going to put it in um just a little aluminum foil casserole dish to kind of bake up because this will be going to my friend’s house. Add a little bit more. So, I had about three cups of broth in there. Um I’m going to before I add that last bit, I’m going to add in a bit of my cream. And we’re going to bring this kind of temperature to the boil. So, we’ll use anywhere between 1 and 1/2 to two cups of cream. You can also go more less decadent and use half and half or even whole milk um and in there, but I figured if we’re going to make it and make it rich and delicious, um we’re going to go all out with the good stuff. I will say I was like, so right now I’ve got about one and a half cups of cream in here. We’re going to start and then I’m going to look at it and see how you know it’s thickening up because I don’t want it to be too runny um for this for our um our tuna casserole. You have a question. Do any of your children show an interest in cooking? Um yeah, actually two of mine I will say um my y my I’ll say my well my youngest they can’t really you know they’re two and almost two and four although Teddy loves to help me in the kitchen all the time but my 10-year-old and my 13-year-old they both are are interested in it. I will say my my 13-year-old son has a really lovely palette. Um, he’s really good at like finding like the obscure flavors and things. Delicious. I don’t think I’ll need to add in any more salt, which is perfect. That’s what I said. The nice thing about using the uh the bullion instead of u salt like or instead of broth is it gives you that saltiness, but it’s not a direct salt. It’s more of that savory um brothy salt flavor. So again, we’re slowly mixing this in. And then we’re going to add in our peas and then our tuna and then our noodles. And we’ll get this um to start kind of baking in the oven. This is a dish that doesn’t take long to bake in the oven. Um so that’s also kind of a plus. There we go. And again, I’m just moving it. put that last little bit in. Um so you don’t scorch anything on the bottom because we are using that kind of cream base. I will add some pepper in here because um that will bring those flavors together. Um but you don’t need to add a lot of different spices. This is one of those dishes where you know simple. We’re going to add So that’s about a half a teaspoon of ground black pepper. Question. How long do you not third. Um, I kind of look for the consistency of it and that it’s thickening up. The longer you cook it, the thicker it will get because it will reduce more. So, I’m actually we’re at a pretty good one. Do you see it’s like a really thick kind of cream. It’s got, you know, a nice rolling bubble on it because remember, we didn’t cook all of our uh noodles all the way through. So, this is going to soak up the noodles will soak up some of it, but you don’t want it Oops. Look at me. I lost my spatula in there. Good thing this is a therm coil or therma spatula. Let me pop this out. I’ll wash my hands. Okay, let me turn this guy down since we’re nice and low now. We’ll get a different spoon. Hopefully I don’t lose it. That’s the one thing about having a really big pot is your they can just slide that way if you you know. Let’s add our peas in. So, this is a little over a cup of peas and they were just frozen peas that I thawed and brought down, you know, so they’re like room temperature here. Um, you could always add in a bit more if you want, but I’m just I think a little like it was like a cup and a half, a little little bit more for green beans are also excellent in this. So, there’s a lot of different things that you can do. Now, we’re going to add in our tuna. Let me grab. Make sure again you have it drained. Um so that uh you’re not adding a bunch of liquid that will then thin out the sauce that we’ve made. And I’m adding in so this is four 5 oz containers, but when it’s all said and done, it’s about uh a pound of tuna. And again, these are packed in water, not oil. I find the oil ones just make the tuna casserole a bit more greasy. Um, so it’s, you know, I prefer the water packed, but if you like it, um, with the oil, you can definitely do it that way. There we go. And this is not one where you can really sub out fresh tuna for this. It just doesn’t quite have that right consistency unless you were to cook your fresh tuna all the way through. Maybe if you had the leftover tuna steaks, um you might be able to repurpose that into a casserole. Here we go. So, I’ve got all of our tuna in here. What brand tuna are you using? This is just the good old Stariss tuna. I feel like that’s the the brand I grew up with. um that and I was it like chicken of the sea that brand and that could be Starkus as well. I just remember those two brands. So, we’re just going to give it a good mix up in there. And those flavors, that tuna flavor, that’s where it’s going to kind of pop in here. I’m going to again I’m going to take a little taste here. Make sure I don’t need to add any more spices. Perfect. Delicious. Now, here is my pound of egg noodles. I did the wide egg noodles, not the super thin ones. And we cook them for just about 5 minutes. So remember, they’re not completely cooked all the way through. We’re going to just pop them in here. Once I start stirring them, they’re going to break apart. So don’t worry about that. You don’t need to mix in any butter or oil with them when you do it. They’ll pop apart when you uh as soon as they get covered in this sauce. Here you go. But again, do not cook them all the way until um you know, cooked all the way through because that will then give you a they’ll get overdone as you bake this in the oven. And a lot of people will be like sometimes their tuna casserles turn out too dry um or you know they’re too wet. You got to be really careful on building your sauce and making sure that it’s either not too runny or too not enough of it because if it’s not enough, as these noodles bake, they suck up the liquid. So, you want it enough in there to give it a really creamy base. You have a question. What type of noodles and can you go over everything that’s in the pan? Yes. So, the noodles are just Yeah, I have a bag right here. It’s just a bag of extra wide egg noodles. um typically on the bottom shelf in the pasta aisle. Uh and I used the whole pound in there. And what we have in here is mushrooms, peas, um sweet peppers, and uh four cans of tuna. And then we made our own homemade cream of mushroom soup. Um after we sauteed up those mushrooms, we added in vegetable broth and cream for this. So those are kind of that and a little bit of flour, of course, some butter to thicken it up. So, here is our base for our tuna casserole. If I was keeping this here, I would put my breadcrumbs over this and pop it in the oven. But since I am going to be sending this off to friends, we are going to load it up in our little bake dish. And this is one of those things that you can make this dish ahead of time and then just before you can make it up to like 3 days ahead of time if you wanted to. And then you just wouldn’t put the breadcrumbs on until right before you bake it. And this only needs to bake for about 15 to 20 minutes because everything is in here cooked. You’re really just marrying those flavors together, allowing the noodles to soak up a little bit of that extra juice, um that sauce in here, and letting those breadcrumbs kind of crisp up. You could also eat it just like this as well. Um, and not even bake it if you don’t want to. Here we go. We’ll just scoop all of this in here. This is why I love this big pan here because making that homemade cream of mushroom soup, it just it’s going to elevate the flavor of the tuna casserole. It’s just going to make it a lot more lovely. Um, and I can this whole thing fits in there and it’s being able to do it in a pan like this. It’s It’s so nice. I will say, especially if you do lots of like pasta dishes. I just I love my big uh six quart sauté pan. I have one in a three quart, which I find is really great for doing rice dishes. Um, but let’s make sure we get all of this delicious sauce in here because again, the sauce is going to be crucial for making sure it’s not too dry or too wet. There we go. So, I’ve got all over here. I’m just going to give it a little kind of pat down everywhere. And now we’re going to take our cr breadcrumbs over here. So, remember this was our panko breadrumbs mixed with a little bit of olive oil and parmesan cheese. And we’re just going to sprinkle this as evenly as we can over the top of this. Got a question. Is this an easy dish to freeze and can you freeze leftovers? Yes, you could definitely freeze this up. You just wouldn’t want to add the breadcrumbs on. You’d always just save that to later so that if you wanted to reheat it, you know, you you’d pop it, you’d dethaw it and then once it was unthawed, you’d cover it with these breadrumbs and pop it in the oven. Because if you put the breadcrumbs on, they’ll get soggy and they won’t be crunchy. You can also use um crushed potato chips or crispy fried onions on the top of this dish. So, you know, a lot of different crunch flavors that are available. I feel like the crushed potato chips is very 1950sesque to me. I feel like that be a bag of UTS potato chips crushed on there. Okay, we’re going to pop this in the oven. This is going to bake at um about 425 for again 15 or so minutes. 15 20 minutes. It doesn’t take long. And remember, we have our blueberry crisp. Well, actually, perfect timing. The crisp is about to come out. So, I can actually just bring that up. Look at our beautiful blueberry crisp here. So, we’ll grab that out. It is nice and bubbly and perfect. Okay, I’m going to transfer it on here. We’re going to bring this blueberry crisp for them as well to have a nice little dessert. And then we’re going to pop our tuna casserole in. We’re just going to slide it right here. And then let’s get our tuna casserole in the oven. So, we’re going to bake this at 4:25. So, I’m going to bring my uh thing up. And again, this doesn’t need very long to bake. So, let me turn my oven. Bake 425. And I’m going to set my timer for about 15 minutes. and it will, you know, we’ll have it cook up. We just really want those breadcrumbs to get kind of golden and crunchy and crispy and do that. Now, while we’re waiting for that, I said we’ve got a lot of sourdough breads we need to pump up, you know, pop up. Let me move my blueberry crisp over here. But you can see we’ve just got that golden brown crumb on the top of there. That blueberry gel is kind of oozing up through. Um, but it just creates this really delicious like fruity in, you know, that crumb flavor. I think the crumb is just so delicious. Okay, let me move over here. You asking for clarifications. Was it breadcrumbs or panko that you put on top? So, panko breadrumbs, which is the Japanese style breadcrumb. And there was parmesan cheese mixed into that. about two tablespoons of parmesan cheese and um a little about tablespoon to 2 tablespoons of olive oil. And you got to mix those together. Now, you can always omit the cheese if you want to, but it adds just a little extra flavor there. Okay, let’s get our kind of meal prep. Tonight, we’re going to have a faukacio with dinner. So, let’s prep up our faukacio real quick. Um and then I’ve got my sourdough loaf. So, we’re going to do a sourdough faukacia for this, which is it’s a really flat kind of bread that is crispy, has a lot of flavoring and seasoning on it. Let me grab my starter. Do you know what’s for dinner yet? The question of the day, I think I might actually be making some pork chops tonight for dinner. So, um I actually have a little bit of an idea. Um my friend, they were deciding what meal they wanted us to bring and um they were deciding first it was pork chops and then I’m like, “Oh, that sounds good. I want pork chops.” And then they’re like, “Oh, can it be tuna casserole?” And I was like, “Definitely whatever you want.” I fed my starter this morning um bright and early at like 6:00 a.m. I was up, you know, back to school. So, it is nice and bubbly and active. Let me grab this. For this recipe, we are going to start out with um let me pop it down. I love this. If you look at it, it’s my favorite part of it. But we’re going to start with about 175 gram of active starter. So, this is a pretty heavy starter recipe um in here. But we want it to have a kind of a quicker rise because we’re going to be baking it up in a couple of hours. Um, and so we want it to kind of puff up in enough time. So, 175 grams. There we go. Don’t need any more from that one. And then we’re going to add in 400 g of water. So, let me bring this back to zero. And I’m using warm water. Um, it just mixes into the flour a little bit nicer when we do it. There we go. And just making it’s always like a There we go. All right. So, we’re going to dilute this in here. So, I’m just going to use my dough whisk, which is this kind of cool little whisk here. Um, it allows this dough to pass through it versus like with a spoon, it all clumps in the basin of it, which is kind of a great tool for making sourdough. Okay, we’ve got that here. Now, we’re going to add in about 1 and 1/2 teaspoon of salt, which is roughly like eight to nine grams if you wanted to do it that way. I just kind of do two little handfuls in there. We are going to be seasoning it up a lot more because a faukachio will cover it with some oil. We’ll stretch it out on the length of a baking sheet and then we’ll kind of cover it up and season it with some fresh herbs and whatnot. And then the it’s really simple. The rest we’re going to use is just uh 400 g of flour on here. Here we go. You’re not going to I’m going to have to get a little bowl. Mine’s nice and heavy here. Let’s get this one. So, for this you don’t have to use bread flour. You can use allpurpose. And since um whenever I don’t have to use bread flour, I use allpurpose in place because it’s a little bit cheaper. But we need about 400 gram for this. And this is going to be the fkacia for the dough for tonight’s dinner. Um, and it’s going to be it’s a high hydration dough, so it will be a little bit sticky. Um, but it’s going to add it will be like we’re going to season it up with I’m going to go out into my garden and I’ll pick some basil, um, rosemary, fresh herbs. It really makes it shine, but it’s a nice thin loaf of bread. Um, and it is so delicious cuz it’s not I always say it’s not even a loaf. It’s like a pizza crust if you think about it. But this is going to be a high hydration. So, this it’s going to get less wet the the longer it does its rises and stuff like that and it’ll be more malleable, but it is a high hydration dough. A little bit more than even my sourdough is. Okay, that is literally all you need for the focacia until we’re ready to bake it. Foca. I always mess up saying it, guys. I know. It’s one of those things you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Okay, for our next uh base, we’re going to prep up. We’re going to do um we’ll make our dough for it. Um but we’re going to do an apple cinnamon one. And it’s going to start out I actually start out using my traditional base. So, it’s pretty pretty simple. It’s 150 grams of active starter. And don’t worry, I have a second jar of starter. I have always have lots and lots of starters going here. So, we’ll use a little bit of this one and a little bit of that one. Question. Where did you get your scale? Uh, this scale I’ve actually had since I was in college. I’ve had it forever. Um, but um and they don’t make it anymore. Um, but I have one that I love even more than this that I use at my parents house and I have it in my um Amazon storefront. But it’s it actually the problem with this scale is it doesn’t allow you to do large amounts. But I’m I’m like one of those people. I’m like, h I already have a scale. I don’t need to buy another one. And I keep saying like I do, but I’m not going to because this one works until it doesn’t. So we need 150 grams. But I do have a KitchenAid one that I love that’s in my storefront um that works even better than this one. So that’s not quite 100, but we’re going to use a little bit of this as well. There we go. So, 150 gram of our starter here. And then we’re going to add in four or uh 565 g of water. This is makes a pretty good size loaf. So, I’m going to need a little bit more than this. So, that brought me up to 450. So, we need a smidge more. There we go. You have a question. Do you name your sourdough? Uh, you know, I don’t necessarily name it I call it he. I have a I call everything I make he. It’s got My husband says we should name it Gustas. He really really wants to get another dog so that we can name it Augustus Gustavis so it could be Gusgus. He really wanted to name our fifth kid that. And I I was like, I’m sorry. As much as I love Gus Gus, I cannot name my kid that. Gus. Okay, we’re just going to dilute this guy up um until you’ve got a nice kind of milky batter there. That’s kind of like the really key part is doing this stage. You can’t just like throw all of your ingredients together. You do really have to like mix it up separately. Um, and kind of allow it’s like the auto lace stage here. Then we’re going to add in about a tablespoon of salt here because this is a big loaf. This isn’t a small loaf. So, it’s about a tablespoon here. And we’re going to do this is my cinnamon loaf. We’re going to add cinnamon in two parts. I add it in the loaf and then I add it also when we are going to do our stretch and folds and laminate it. I also add it in there as well after we lamin it out to add just an extra pop. But I do cinnamon sugar then. So we’re going to add in about a teaspoon or so of cinnamon. Now, cinnamon, I will say, do a smidge more. Likes to sit on top of your water or your milk. It doesn’t mix in as well. So, it will sit on top until we add that flour in there. There we go. But I always like to get it cuz I like that flavor to kind of soak in. And then we’re going to do 750 g of flour here. And this one I actually want to use bread flour for. So, let me grab my bread flour. Bread flour for the actual loaves turns out a little bit better because this is going to sit a lot longer. It’s going to have a chance to kind of build the gluten thing on here. And you want to use unbleached. I will say with the sourdough journey, always used unbleached um because that bleaching process kills the natural yeast that occurs on flour. So, we need 750 g. That got me about 450. So, 300 more. I will say Amazon um they sell their own flour and they they make it unbleached and it is a lot cheaper than what you can get at the store, which is I always think is a win. You know, we’re always cooking for a large amount of people here. So, uh, anything to cut back on those groceries because today’s groceries costs a lot more than they used to. I always love seeing those like throwback and like this is what it cost back then and I was like, oh, if only. Okay, almost at it. Look at this nice mountain. So, that is 750 grams on the nose. Exactly 750 gram. Now this when in doubt. Almost. There we go. Add it in. I will say this already smells like a nice cinnamon uh roll. That’s just so delicious. Okay, we’re going to mix this guy in here. Now, this is not going to be quite as sticky as our faukatcha. I’m gonna make sure I’m eventually going to learn how to sederate because it’s got a little bit less it’s not quite as high of a hydration on there. Um, which means that it’s a little bit easier to work with. It’s not quite as sticky. But with all sourdough, you don’t do the traditional kneading that you would with a yeastbased bread. You do what they call a stretch and a pull. And you do that for the first two hours about every 20 to 30 minutes. Um, and the way you get the dough to not stick to you is you just wet your hands and that kind of creates a nonstick on it. Here we go. So, we’ve got our beautiful cinnamon based dough for it. And then we’re going to cut up some apples and we’ll toss those with a little bit of cinnamon sugar. And they’re going to go into this loaf as well. It’s going to just make it all the better. We only need um one apple for this because we’re going to cut them up into pretty small chunks here. So, let me grab I’ll grab my knife over here. We’ll give it a quick rinse and grab my cutting board that we never used. I have these like ridiculous fruit cutting boards. Um they’re so kind of cute. So, I’m going to cut these in fourth and then I’m going to get my pairing knife to peel it and then we’ll chop it up. But think small when you don’t want it to be too thick because or too big these apple slices and you want the skin off because the skin never gets tender. Um so I always peel it and you want to use a tart apple for this. So, Granny Smith works great. Um, because you you want that tart flavor to kind of come through in here. We’re going to be sprinkling some cinnamon sugar on it, but it’s just works out a little bit better. Peel the skin. I know a lot of times when you ever you make apple dishes, you’re like, “Do I really have to peel off the skin?” Yes. This the apple skin does not um get tender. So, what will happen is you’ll have it in your bread and you’ll just have like a chewy bit. So, this is going to end up much nicer if you trim it off. And then we’ll add this in here. Mince it up really small because I find if you make your apple chunks too big, then it kind of messes with the texture of the bread a little bit. You you’ll have just these hard pieces. We have about our tuna casserole is almost ready. I peaked over there. There’s about a minute or so left on it. So, we’re going to kind of chop this up nice and small because I want these nice little apple bits all throughout. So, you see, so you’re not going to use a whole lot. I find if you overload your sourdough, um, then it won’t get as much of a pop. Um, especially during the lamination stage. We’ll mince these up and then we’ll go grab that tuna casserole out because that can it’s one of those nice things. It’s they can sit for a minute or two on there. So, let’s get these minced up in there. Here we go. So, again, really little teeny tiny bits. And you can see when you cut them up a lot smaller, you actually get a lot more on there than you think. It’s always like potatoes when you cut them up, they’re always a lot bigger than you think. So, we’ll just go over here. Okay, let’s go grab our tuna casserole out. Um, I’m going to move this over here so I have a place to put it. And then we can season those up and put it in here. Okay. Beautiful. Look how those crisp up so nicely. We’ve got that golden kind of color on there. What really helps that is the oil and the parmesan cheese in there. Gives you this kind of perfect little crunch on there which will be delicious. And it’s one of those things where like, wow, we did a lot of prep. But you could always, if you love this, you could make a bunch of them. you know, freeze down some of them, have them prepped, and then when it’s time, you just make your crumb topping to kind of bake on there for your just kind of classic tuna casserole over it. You know, we used um there was four cans of tuna in it. We made our own creamy cream of mushroom soup. We used, you know, eight ounces of fresh mushrooms, sauteed them up, made a delicious kind of butter r, and then added in vegetable broth and cream for that just rich flavor. We also added in um some sweet peppers that we sauteed up. We have about a cup and a half of peas and we used extra wide noodles for just delicious. And this we’re going to serve this up for my friends. are going to have it with the blueberry crisp that we made where we we took about um you almost a pound of fresh blueberries. We made this lovely kind of little slurry base with them using sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and cornstarch kind of that base. And then we made that crumb topping with oats and brown sugar. And now we’re going to finish up our um cinnamon apple uh sourdough loaf. And these will all be pulling thing. We’ll shape them tonight in our dinner stream. Um, and then they’ll go in the fridge to proof. Except our pocachio. We’ll let that sit and we’re going to bake that up tonight. So, I’m going to sprinkle my apples right here with a little bit of cinnamon. Kind of coat them. And then that’s probably like a half a teaspoon. Got a little bit of this lemon left. This is just going to prevent them from going brown. Just squeezing a little bit of that lemon juice over there. Also keeps them nice and tart. And then let me grab a little bit of our sugar. We don’t need much. I’m going to kind of coat this up. So I’m going to use this is like an eighth of a cup. So about, you know, two to three tablespoons. Not even going to use all of it. We’re just going to mix it here. But I like them to get a little bit of sweetness because they’re going to have these like kind of pops of flavor in there. Here we go. And I So you can always add your apples in and some different parts. You could add them during the lamination stage. I like to add them in now so that I will have those apple flavors will actually kind of go into the loaf. So, we’re going to put them in here and then we’ll do our stretch and pulls around it to kind of incorporate. And I do it at the first stretch and pulls because then they get thoroughly mixed through by the time we are ready for them. Okay. So, wet fingers. Always use wet fingers. We’re just going to pull up from the sides and kind of fold it over because remember it’s a high hydration dough. So you can’t really work with it the way you would typical dough. And I’m just going to keep pulling it around and kind of mix it. And now by the time we’ve done our four rounds of stretch and pulls, this is the first one. This will be completely incorporated. Well guys, thank you so much for joining us here. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. I try to do live cooking shows every single day, kind of show you what we’re making and hopefully teach you guys something along the way. Again, we do upload all of our videos to the link on our page. So, um if you ever want to recreate any of these recipes at home, all you have to do is go to that link, search for what we look made today. So, we made our tuna casserole and our blueberry crisp, so you can always learn to make those at home again. And um we also have a link to our um Amazon storefront that has all of our different cooking gadgets and gear in there. I’ve got my Hexclad, my AllClad pans, my knives, everything I use in this kitchen. got my sourdough kits and stuff like in there. Everything um for you guys to check out if you’re interested. But again guys, thank you so much for joining us here today.