Buffalo Seafood Casserole, Version 1

Hello Readers,

Sorry I haven't posted in so long.  It's been an extremely busy last semester and summer for me.  I'm finally finished with my schoolwork and am just waiting for the registrar to process my grades so that I can graduate.  More good news is that I got a job as a test plan runner at Epic Software in Verona, WI, and leased an apartment in Fitchburg, WI, at The New Fountains.  It's pretty neat here so far!

But anyway It's time to get down to what I intended to post about: Cooking!  I had wanted to make a Buffalo Seafood Casserole over the weekend so I decided to search for a recipe, but there did not appear to be any on the internet.  So I decided to make a new recipe!



Here are the ingredients I used:

• 1 head of celery
• 2 baking potatoes
• 1 white onion
• 2 spoonfuls minced garlic
• 1 23oz bottle of Frank's redhot
• a good amount of olive and/or canola oil
• little bit of butter
• 20oz Frigo crumbled blue cheese
• 15oz tub of Roundy's part skim ricotta cheese
• 2 starkist chunk light tuna in water family size
• 1 Kanimi 1lb crab flavored seafood flakes
• Ocean eclipse bay scallops, 1lb bag frozen
• Roundy's cooked shrimp tail on, 2lb bag frozen
• little bit of salt
• little bit of black pepper

Here are instructions: 

1. defrost bag of shrimp and scallops.  Separate half the bag of shrimp and refreeze for later.  take 1/4 of scallops and refreeze for later.
2. detail the lb of shrimp and put it in a plastic bag
3. take the lb of seafood flakes as a block out of the bag and cut it in strips short-ways
4. put the defrosted shrimp and flakes and scallops in the fridge
5. peel rinse and slice your potatoes into very thin circles and put them in a bag
6. preheat your oven to 350 degrees
7. rub your little bit of butter onto the bottom of a 13x9 casserole pan/dishtypething
8. cut leaves off stalks of celery and place them concave side down facing so that they are lengthwise from 9" side to 9" side of the pan.
9. chop onion
10. Sautee onion and minced garlic in olive or canola oil in a really big frying pan
11. scoop onions and garlic over celery
12. put a little bit more oil in the pan, add your shrimp and add enough Frank's redhot to serve as a cooking base.
13. cook down your shrimp a bit so that they are small and hot
14. scoop your shrimp out of the pan and layer over your celery and onions
15. put your scallops in the pan with the leftover juices.  add more hotsauce
16. cook your scallops down until they are tiny
17. pour your scallops and hotsauce mix over the rest of the stuff
18. put a little oil in the pan and put your seafood flakes into the pan.  pour hotsauce over top and stir hotsauce in until the flakes are coated
19. cook your flakes and put them over the rest of it.
20. sprinkle 10 of your 20 oz of blue cheese over the stuff.  drizzle hotsauce on top
21. open your packages of tuna and put it in the pan.  stir hotsauce into the tuna and cook to get the water out of the tuna and the hotsauce flavor in.
22. spread hotsaucey tuna over the other stuff from end to end of the dish
23. attempt to cook your potato slices in olive or canola oil.  add your salt and pepper
24. distribute your potato slices evenly over the stuff.
25. sprinkle the rest of your blue cheese over the stuff.  
26. scoop out some of the ricotta cheese in as tiny quantities as you can manage and distribute evenly across the pan.  you don't have to use the whole tub.  drizzle hotsauce on top
27. cook in oven uncovered for 30 minutes
28. after taking out of the oven use a knife to make many cuts so that the celery will be in smaller pieces.

On the whole I think it turned out very well, but I have some ideas for improvement that I will try next time.

• I had two stalks of celery that would not really fit.  next time I'll cut up the celery into little bits beforehand and fit them with the cut side down on the bottom of the pan
• I could have used another half of onion.
• I could have used 1 and 2/3rds potatoes instead of two
• The potato slices got very hot but they were definitely not cooked.  stuff kept burning to the bottom of the pan because I didn't clean it after cooking the tuna.  I should have sliced the potatoes thinner and cooked half of them then cooked the other half.
• I would use 1 package of tuna instead of two.  I realized when I was adding the tuna that, hey I tried buffalo tuna before and I didn't really like it.  It turned out well this time but if I used less tuna I could use more room for other things.  since there would not be enough tuna to spread to the edges of the pan, I would space 6 dollops of tuna evenly.
• I would have used all of the shrimp and scallops because they cooked down a lot and now I want something to balance out the decrease in tuna
• I would put the cheese down before the potatoes

If you try out the recipe with the improvements let me know how it was!

-Tom Anesta