Running with Scissors

Sara Peterson-Davis has worked as a newspaper researcher and reporter, as well as a communications director and consultant. She and her husband, Monty Davis, can be found in Liberty, Mo., keeping their two children from running with scissors. Contact Sara

The Emperors New Tuna

by Sara Peterson-Davis

Like anyone who cooks for a family sometimes I just run out of ideas.

I have my old family dinner standards that I serve up on a regular basis – spaghetti, tacos, grilled chicken, pepper steak and lasagna. If these are on the menu, I can almost guarantee no one will complain.

But sometimes I get stuck in a rut and I have to cook something new to keep my sanity and my taste buds. So I start combing cookbooks and magazines for new recipes.

The results of my culinary research, my family would report, are unpredictable.

The other day I found a new recipe for tuna casserole. That, I thought, is quite an achievement. Instead of macaroni-n-cheese or canned soup, this one called for sour cream and mozzarella. Now, as far as I’m concerned any recipe is worth trying if it has sour cream and some type of cheese in its ingredients list.

So I decided to whip it up. Aside from the aforementioned ingredients, the recipe also called for tuna, onions, spaghetti sauce, cottage cheese and bread crumbs.

Now when I repeated this recipe to a couple of accomplished cooks, they kind of gave me strange looks, but agreed it might make a tasty dish. I didn’t understand their reaction until I mixed the sour cream, cottage cheese and spaghetti sauce. Together they turned into a pinkish orange mixture with little white lumps. The more I mixed the worse it got, a bit like a salmon dropped in a blender set at frappe.

Despite its disturbing color, I mixed in the pasta, poured it all into a casserole dish, camouflaged it with the bread crumbs and threw it in the oven. I hoped 375 degrees for 30 minutes would take the colorful twang out of my tuna.

When dinnertime came around the color was close to neon. I dished it up without comment.

As promised the recipe was tangy and quite tasty. Everyone at the table seemed to be enjoying it, seemingly oblivious to its color. Or so I thought.

I looked over and my 8-year-old, Brynne, was pushing the salmon-colored noodles around her plate.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked impatiently. If someone’s going to have a problem with a new recipe, it’s going to be our youngest. One time she declared a meatloaf too…meaty.

“It tastes fine, but I just can’t eat anything that’s this color,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked as if we ate lumpy pinkish food every day.

“It’s pink,” she said flatly.

It was strangely quiet at either end of the table, where the men in my family were keeping their heads down and their forks busy.

“Yeah, but you said it tastes good.”

“But it’s hard to look at.”

I really couldn’t argue there.

“Maybe you could use a blindfold,” my husband quipped.

“Or close you’re eyes while you eat,” her brother piped in.

I growled.

“What?” the kids asked in unison.

“Just what I was aiming for, food that’s hard on the eyes,” I laughed. “Eat!”

Oh, I could be discouraged, but I can’t let one setback make me throw in the rolling pin. I can’t stop cooking. My family has nightly reservations until at least 2017.

I just need to regroup. First thing I need to do is add a color wheel to my drawer of kitchen gadgets.

And the blindfolds? They’re optional.

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