Don’t be fooled by the title of this post. It’s so easy to make that a 9 year old would have no problem doing so. But best of all, you’d probably already have all the ingredients in your pantry. Especially if you’re one of those lazy people (ie: me) who shop for convenience (read: frozen food, instant food, canned food, errr ready-diced garlic FML). One thing I’m sure of is that if a nuclear bomb were to go off now, I would probably survive better with all the food stuff that we have, due to the fact that they don’t have expiry dates and therefore do not expire.
That’s my version of immortal food. Okay without wasting anymore text space on my grocery shopping behaviour, lets move on to the ingredients that goes into the making of “Delicious Fusilli with Tuna in Mushroom Sauce”:
# – Italian herbs. Just to pay homage to the fact that it’s sort of an Italian dish.
# – Paprika. Because chopping up fresh chilis is such a bloody chore.
# – Olive oil. You can use whatever oil that rocks your pants but we’re sticking to olive oil because it makes me feel like I’m eating healthily.
# – Butter. You may use any kind of aromatic solid fat really (ie: lard and ghee) but please for heaven’s sake, throw away the margarine! You might as well melt a plastic spoon and eat it. As you can see, ours is blended with vegetable oil – same reason as to why we use olive oil above.
# – Salt for taste.
# – Drumroll!!!! Here comes the mushroom……soup. Didn’t expect that did you? Yeah, the entire mushroom content of the dish belongs to this box of powdered mushroom soup (which by the way is my favourite powdered mushroom soup of them all).
# – Tuna. If you’ve got fresh good cuts of tuna, good on you! But I’m nothing but a mere mortal, so I’m getting my tuna from a can.
# – Last but not least, the fusilli of course. Make sure you get a packet that says ‘Authentic Italian’ because that will inject more culture into your dish.
And now…..the cooking!
# – Boil 3 fistfuls of fusilli in a pot of water seasoned with a dash of salt and olive oil. Salt is supposed to make your pasta less bland and olive oil is supposed to keep them from sticking together in case you got too engrossed with checking your Twitter timeline and overcooked the poor pasta.
# – If you have botched the above up, it’s okay, you can start over but make sure you switch off the computer before you begin. If you didn’t botch it up, congratulations! Now pour off the water but not all of it, make sure to leave some for the pasta sauce. Throw in a dollop or 5 dollops of butter into the pasta. Mix well.
# – Now open a packet of powdered mushroom soup and slowly pour the content into the pasta. Mix as you pour. This is the part of the cooking where your logic needs to kick in. Don’t get too excited and dump the entire packet in because it might end up to be too salty. Taste as you go. Remember, taste as you go.
# – While still stirring the mushroom soup + pasta mixture, put some paprika into it. This serves to give the dish a little kick. If you prefer spicier, you may throw in leftover Domino’s chili flakes in (I save them all the time, don’t you?).
The pasta part is now done, set it aside and keep it warm. Which in my world means, turn off the flame for now and turn it on again later when the tuna’s done :P
# – In a different pot, heat up some olive oil.
# – Get the tuna as dry as possible by draining the brine. You don’t want to have oil popping in your face from cooking tuna, seriously. Then chuck them into the pot. They’re already cooked, but the point of this exercise is to brown them to a crisp, so you’ll have crispy and juicy tuna to chomp on. You may throw in a dash of Italian herbs to flavour the tuna.
# – Lastly, transfer the fusilli onto a plate and lay the tuna carefully on top. Garnish with more Italian herbs, paprika and some black pepper.
# – Ladies & gentlemen, delicious fusilli with tuna in mushroom sauce. Tasty and feels surprisingly healthy. Must be the olive oil ;)
