Taking the mystery and fear out of cooking
Another absurdly easy meal to prepare. It doesn’t require any actual ‘cooking’ apart from boiling some pasta.
It is low in calories and full of goodness.
If you have kids to feed, you may even be able to get them to eat this. It has been known for me to be asked for seconds. Don’t bank on that, but it’s a possibility.
Ingredients (for two people)
Pasta (penne, fusilli, farfalle etc).
Lettuce (Romaine, Little Gem, whatever)
Can of tuna in oil
Capers
One fresh lime or lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
Method
Logical tip
Do the pasta in advance. It will take 20 minutes or so to cook and then it has to cool. Keep soaking it in cold water and straining until it’s close to fridge temperature. When it has lost the heat, drain it well and mix it up with a little olive oil to stop it sticking together.
So: cook the pasta. Drain, cool and place in salad bowl.
Rinse and drain the lettuce, just in case. Lettuce plants grow close to the ground, and although it is unlikely that you will find a slug, snail or valuable Roman coin in there, nobody likes crunching pieces of grit.
Chop (or tear apart) the lettuce and add to the bowl
Add the tuna (with its oil)
Sprinkle in a tablespoon of capers
Squeeze the lime or lemon over everything
Pour on a little olive oil
Mix with your hands
Add black pepper and salt to taste (it won’t need much)
Note: there is no need to mix the oil and citrus juice first.
Drink the rest of the glass of wine that you have already started.
Flexibility
You could use iceberg lettuce (bland as hell but easy to work with and it does keep better than most). Or if the lettuce in the shop is all rubbish, maybe you can find some nice spinach leaves.
The capers are like little grenades of flavor. You could add black olives, chopped sweet peppers, anything like that, but no onions: that would change it completely.
Lazy git tip
A bag of salad leaves will save you the trouble of tearing a lettuce apart, so if you’re into making Formula 1-like time savings, you could reduce the preparation time by 0.004 seconds in this way.
