Subversive tuna recipe

Subversive because, according to a certain person on American TV (see two posts below), I should be contributing more to society than a tuna recipe.

But I'm going to send it around anyway, because it's pretty easy and because it's not tuna casserole. The Squirrel family really does not like tuna casseroles. We've tried regular tuna casserole, Asian tuna casserole, a few other variations, and they all end up tasting like...tuna casserole.

So when we hit a really good sale on tuna a few weeks ago (I think it was 58 cents a can, so eat your heart out David Tsubouchi--does anyone remember his little tuna fiasco?), I wasn't sure what we were going to do with several cans of tuna besides make sandwiches.

Then I remembered Edna Staebler's recipe for Salmon or Tuna Wrap-Up in More Food That Really Schmecks. Edna recently turned 100 and celebrated with a big birthday party. This book came out when she was a young thing of about 75 and I was just learning to cook...Mom and Dad Squirrel gave me a copy for my birthday that year.

Oh yes...the recipe. Well, I'm not going to give you the whole thing because I think you can figure most of it out for yourself. This is what you do:

1. Make your favourite tuna salad with two cans of tuna (or salmon). Because we have some food aversions in the family to things like raw chopped onion, we make about the simplest possible tuna salad: tuna plus some generic white salad dressing (you know the stuff, it looks like mayonnaise) plus a spoonful of pickle relish. You can use any other kind of tuna salad you want, as healthy or as unhealthy as you prefer.

2. Make a biscuit dough with the following ingredients: 1/4 cup butter, margarine or oil; 2 cups flour (I used unbleached all-purpose); 3 tsp. baking powder; 1/2 to 3/4 tsp. salt; 3/4 cup milk or enough to make the dough hang together. This is just basic biscuit dough with an extra teaspoon of baking powder.

3. Roll the dough out into an oblong about 1/2 inch thick. Either spread the tuna salad over it and roll up like a jelly roll (what we did); or line a greased loaf pan with the dough, with the edges hanging out, plop the tuna salad on top, and bring the edges not quite together in the middle (leave a vent). If you roll it up like a jelly roll, put the whole thing into the greased loaf pan.

4. Bake at 400 degrees F for at least 15 minutes, maybe 20, until the biscuit dough is done. (I had it in at 425 degrees just to be sure.) If you rolled it up, you can remove it from the loaf pan, slice it into several rounds, and serve it on a platter. If you did the wrap-around version, you'll probably have to serve it from the pan.

5. Serve with a white sauce or gravy if you like, and a salad. (We have a vegetarian gravy recipe from the Goldbecks' book American Wholefoods Cuisine, that's simple to mix up. I'll post it if anybody wants it.)

6. Ta-da. Hot tuna sandwiches.