Tuna Poppers

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I’m ready to take a break from prepping…just kidding! It’s important that you are also learning skills while you are also prepping for emergencies too. If you have all of the food on hand but you don’t know how to cook it then it won’t do you very much good. It’s also important to be able to use what you’ve got and to be able to do that in the best way you may need to learn new recipes to cook. If you try a recipe and you love it- write it down! You just never know when you won’t have access to your phone to be able to look up a recipe. These tuna poppers are a super easy recipe that you would be able to whip up on a whim if needed. 

The Original Tuna Poppers Recipe

The original recipe came from another recipe book that I got from my grandma after she passed. This one is a local one to us which makes it even more special to me. This particular book was created to raise funds for the St. Sebastian Alter Society. Back in 1984 the wonderful women associated with St. Sebastian submitted their favorite recipes to make this book.

The tuna poppers recipe was submitted by Debbie Funk. As always, if you know Debbie please let her know that we are still over here enjoying her wonderful recipe. Her tradition lives on with us and that is a pretty cool thought.

Ingredients

• 2 (12 oz) cans tuna, flaked
• ½ cup fresh bread crumbs
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup milk
• 2 Tbsp minced onion
• 2 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1 can mushroom soup (for gravy)

Directions

Put in greased muffin tins. Set in pan of hot water and bake at 350 for 45 minutes. 

Heat can of soup as it is in can and use for gravy when serving.

Tips & Tricks

Well those directions leave a little to be desired don’t they! To clarify you should be mixing all of the ingredients together except for the mushroom soup. From there you are scooping it into the greased muffin tins. 

For just my husband and I, we halved this recipe. It made about 10 poppers which was actually a bit more than we could eat. They heated up wonderfully for lunch the next day though.

As you can imagine, we did not use a can of mushroom soup. If you are using canned soup I encourage you to analyze the ingredients and make sure that is what you want to be putting in your body. After that, you can research BPA liners in the cans and let me know if you still want to use that soup! The alternative item is a mushroom soup mix from Azure. I mix it with a little broth and milk. If I want it to be thicker than that I will also add some arrowroot powder. Since this was being used as a gravy I added quite a bit of arrowroot to give it a nice gelatinous gravy consistency. 

The one really great thing about this recipe is that you can use whatever fish you have on hand. It does not have to be tuna! I also used sardines for this and it was a wonderful dinner! Even my husband, who is very reserved about eating sardines, said that they were fantastic. With the gravy spread on top they don’t have a very fishy taste at all. Generally, I find that is what steers people away from sardines. The only thing I would add is that if you are using a “whole” fish vs the flaked tuna you will want to mash it up a bit. My favorite way to do this is to use my potato masher. I put the fish in the bowl first and then mashed it with the rest of the ingredients. 

I also didn’t put the pan in water. Not sure why that makes a difference but I don’t do it. These turn out perfectly crispy without it so don’t worry if you skip that step.

In Summary: Tuna Poppers

Listen, I love red meat. I’m a carnivore and could probably eat beef every single day. However, a lot of the recipes that I share are going to be using other meats or seafood. There is one simple reason for that- they challenge me. These recipes challenge me to get outside of my comfort zone and I’m hoping that they do the same to you. Fish, especially sardines, have so many more nutrients than just beef.

We often wonder why our ancestors were in better shape than us and it’s likely because their diets were more varied. They ate a lot of fish and organ meats which are lost from our diets. As part of our homesteading life I try to incorporate fish into our diets once per week and I’m working on more ways for organ meats.

Speaking of organ meats, if you have any good recipes for them please share them with us in the comments! I’d love to give them a try. Also want to take this moment again to remind you to write this recipe down if you liked it. Paper copies might come in handy one day.

P.S. If you are new to Azure please use code BriannaHart1 at checkout to bless our family in a small way.