Salade Nicoise

I was so happy to discover I had the ingredients to make this the other day.

Green beans, blanched
New red potatoes, boiled
Anchovy filets
Lettuce
Hard boiled eggs
Tuna
Olives
Capers
Mustard sprouts (from City Roots -- so tasty)

The dressing is a simple vinaigrette: just mustard, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar. You toss some of it with the potatoes and green beans while they're still warm. Then you serve everything at room temperature and drizzle dressing over it.

We ate it with bread and butter on the side.

Double-Decker Tuna Brie Melts

I used a few cans of solid white albacore to make a simple tuna salad: touch of mayo, tablespoon of minced fresh parsley, lemon juice, lots of black pepper. I put some of it in between whole wheat bread bread, which I then sauteed in a pan with a tiny bit of butter and olive oil.

Then I piled the rest of the tuna salad on top of the sandwiches, slapped some slices of cheap grocery store Brie on top, and broiled the sandwiches in the toaster oven.

We ate the sandwiches with carrot sticks, fresh mirasol chiles, and Yuengling. The meal reminded me of a childhood lunch fancied up and served for adult dinner.

Tuna-Caper Pasta Sauce

From the department of Really Easy Late Night Dinners, here's some tuna-caper pasta sauce I made yesterday.

Lawson has a long tradition of kitchen-sink-style pasta dishes, usually containing tomatoes, canned tuna or clams, olives, parsley -- whatever's around. He hasn't made one in a while, though, and I wanted one, so I made my own version. It turned into a much more traditional Italian rendition than his usually are.

It's not a very tomato-ey sauce -- don't expect it to be red. The rich tuna flavor and the bright capers should be the dominant flavors. The garlic is more like a base.

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1-2 tablespoons garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup vermouth
• 2 cans tuna, with juice
• 1 tablespoon capers
• regular (14.5 oz) can diced or stewed tomatoes, seasoned or plain
• salt
• pepper
• small handful parsley, chopped

Saute the garlic very slowly over medium-low heat until light golden. Add the rest of the ingredients except the parsley and simmer slowly until flavors blend, 10-30 minutes. The sauce should be fairly wet; it very easily gets absorbed into the pasta.

If you like, you can roast a pan full of diced eggplant at 450 degrees while you're making the sauce, then toss the eggplant in with the pasta and sauce. In that case, make sure the sauce is really wet.

I used bowtie pasta and several garden eggplants. It was enough for two dinners and one leftover lunch -- perfect.

Tuna and Some Simple Sides

I'm going to give up buying fresh tuna for home cooking. Even when it's gorgeous, as this slab was, it's never as fresh tasting or perfectly textured as I hope. So it's not worth the expense, even just twice a year. I'll eat it in restaurants, where it will be better prepared and more carefully sourced.

But aside from the disappointing tuna, this was a delicious meal. I cooked soba noodles and tossed them with a super-quick peanut sauce I invented on the spot. We were going out and I didn't want to breathe garlic or green onions at anyone, so I just mixed a few tablespoons of chunky natural peanut butter with small amounts of soy sauce, sriracha, rice vinegar, and a dash of sugar, then thinned the mixture with some hot water. I tossed that with the cooked and rinsed soba noodles and some cilantro and served it at room temperature.

The green beans I boiled until they were tender, then tossed with lemon zest, dried lavender, tiny snipped pieces of candied ginger, olive oil, salt and pepper. This was an experiment based on an amazing lavender-lemon coffeecake I tried last year at Macrina, a bakery in Seattle. It worked. I will make them again.

Spicy Peanut Noodles with Raw Vegetables

Recently I bought a big chunk of tuna and grilled it. With it we had rice noodles with a sauce from Nina Simonds' Asian Noodles book. I added red pepper, sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, and julienned carrots to the noodles.

Here's the sauce, which she calls Chinese Peanut Dressing. Sure, it has Chinese ingredients, but it can be used in a lot of ways, Chinese and not -- basically anytime you need a peanut sauce that isn't coconut-milk-based.

Combine in a food processor:

- a chunk of peeled ginger, enough to yield a few tablespoons minced
- 2-5 cloves garlic (recipe calls for 8, and I love garlic, but even 6 was too much)
- 1 teaspoon hot chile sauce (like Sriracha) or more
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 3.5 tablespoons sugar (less if you use scary sweetened hydrogenated peanut butter like Jif, but I know you would never do that)
- 3.5 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce or Chinese black vinegar (I've never used the latter)
- 3 tablespoons sesame oil
- 5 tablespoons or more water or chicken broth

Burger and Fries

We would love to have fresh fish three times a week, but the reality is that it's expensive and inconvenient to achieve that goal. So we sometimes fall back on frozen fish--some are better than others. I don't like frozen salmon very well, or cod, and frozen snapper is loathesome. But orange roughy, tuna (especially albacore), and halibut seem to freeze more successfully.

Last night with my thawed ahi steak I made some delicious tuna burgers. I found the recipe in American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, edited by Molly O'Neill.

Tuna Burgers

1 pound raw tuna

2 teaspoons minced garlic

3 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon cayenne

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Chop the tuna finely with a chef's knife, or grind, but don't put in food processor. Mix above ingredients, form four patties.

Saute 3 or 4 minutes per side in:

Olive oil

I skipped the recommended teriyaki glaze and served it with the more ketchup-like Thai sweet chile sauce, roasted new potatoes, and Kale with Carmelized Onions and Balsamic Vinegar. It was a light and different dinner.

Jack Bishop's kale recipe specified blanching the chopped kale for 8 minutes before stirring it into the carmelized onions. I worried about all the vitamins going down the drain, but the kale was was tender and delicious.

Tuna Melts

I really love canned tuna. I make tuna salad with curry powder and pecans and grapes, or cubed raw apples and red peppers, or balsamic vinegar and walnuts and parsley -- it's good all kinds of ways. But I think tuna melts should be more basic, and until last night I hadn't made one I was totally happy with.

For the tuna salad:
- 2 cans tuna. I think water-packed chunk light Starkist is A-OK.
- 1 tablespoon mayo
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- a few teaspoons lemon juice
- 1 teaspoon mild coarse grain mustard
- 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
- lots of black pepper

Mix together and spread on:
- Homemade bread or other thick, serious bread. I used some half-whole wheat half-white long-fermented bread I made the day before (more on that soon).

Top with:
- 2-3 thin slices of sharp cheddar
- a small handful of grated mozzarella

Saute for one minute in olive oil, then move entire pan to under broiler until cheese is bubbly and brown.

I garnished it with tarragon for no reason other than that it's hard to find uses for tarragon. And as with nearly every summer meal, we ate it with fresh chiles, sliced tomatoes, and steamed okra.