Spaghetti with tuna and fresh tomatoes

A simple meal for complicated times...


I haven't updated much recently because, well, I haven't been cooking much recently. Instead, I've been moving to Malta (after a brief stop in New York)! Briefly, I'll be studying at the University of Malta for a year as part of a master's program - not something I would have even suspected one year ago!

Life has been pretty hectic these past few weeks, what with seeing all my friends before leaving the country, moving to a new land, looking for an apartment, etc. It was strange to go for two whole weeks without so much as preparing a sandwich, but now that I'm finally settled into an apartment, I've started cooking again, and it definitely feels good!

Whenever I move to a new place or am dealing with a lot of complicated stuff in my life, I tend to fall back to cooking what I know and love best. This has meant I've been eating lots of spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables, but I've also been alternating that with this dish, which is even easier to prepare, and is of course, delicious. If you want to make it, definitely do it soon, before all the good tomatoes vanish!

Ingredients (per person):
75 g. spaghetti
1 small can of tuna, or half a larger can
A couple handfuls (about 10) cherry tomatoes or one large tomato
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Oregano

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, salt it, and add the spaghetti. While the spaghetti are cooking, wash the tomatoes and chop them in halves, or into small chunks if you're using a large tomato. Drain any olive oil from the tuna can, mash it up with a fork, and add to the tomatoes.

Note that I like to drain the olive oil from the can and add my own because the olive oil used to preserve tuna is generally of a lower quality, and if there's one thing I adore besides really good bread, it's really good olive oil! If you don't care about this, then of course you can just use the same olive oil the tuna came in.

When the spaghetti are al dente, drain them, and add them to the tuna and tomatoes. Add a spoonful or two of olive oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and oregano, mix up well, and serve!

I've also tried this with sun-dried tomatoes, and it was great, although rather salty. Adding some fresh mozzarella might help even things out a bit - I'll hopefully try that one out soon!

Spaghetti with cream of zucchini

I promised to post a recipe for a pasta that was not penne and so, here it is!


The idea for this dish came about because of the large zucchini that had been sitting in my fridge for nearly a week and clearly needed to be dealt with. This is how a good number of my recipes come about (and I might guess, many other people's recipes as well): I think "hmmm, I need to get rid of this ___(insert perishable food item)___. Now, what would be a fun way to do that?"

This time, the idea of a creamy zucchini sauce really appealed to me and it was something I had never tried before, so I decided to give it a go!

While the basics of the sauce weren't that hard to figure out, I had a lot of trouble deciding which cheese I wanted to go with my zucchini (being slightly lactose-intolerant, I'm not a big fan of sauces that use actual cream, which is a shame). Ricotta seemed like an obvious choice but I just wanted something different this time. The only problem was that I didn't have any idea what that "something different" would be. I went to three grocery stores, hoping for that one cheese that would just pop out at me, and finally, at the third - the one with the best selection of cheeses - I found one that looked promising - a cheese by the name of Laura Chenel Chef Chevre. This soft chevre, I decided, was just the thing for my zucchini sauce.

An excellent idea, as it turned out. Though I'd never seen a zucchini-chevre pairing before, I'm a big fan of goat cheeses in general, and the lightness of the chevre was a good companion for the delicate zucchini. The only issue with this combination was that the sauce was a bit drier than I would have liked - an issue which can easily be fixed by adding in a bit of milk along with the cheese.

You will need:
75 g of spaghetti (I finally got a kitchen scale so I could actually measure instead of just guessing!)
One largish zucchini
One shallot
Extra-virgin olive oil, which I have just realized is what is being called "olio EVO" in all these Italian recipes, i.e. "olio ExtraVergine d'Oliva"
About 50 g chevre
Half a glass of white wine
Salt
Pepper
A few spoonfuls of milk/cream

Chop up the shallot and wash the zucchini, cutting off the ends. Using the large holes of a cheese grater, grate the zucchini into little striplets. If you don't have a cheese grater, you can chop up the zucchini into very tiny pieces, or find some other tool that will help you get the zucchini into a similar state. Whether you add the peel or not is up to you. I like to add it in, but I have to chop it up since I haven't found a way to grate an entire zucchini without also grating my fingers!


When grating, do not use the fine holes of a grater or a microplane or any such thing. You will get a bunch of very messy and difficult mush, as I discovered the first time I tried to grate zucchini.

In a large pot, bring some water to a boil. When it's boiling, salt it and add the spaghetti. Then, heat the olive oil in a sauté pan. When the oil is hot, add the chopped-up shallot. I always test the olive oil by flicking a few droplets of cold water onto it and seeing if they start jumping and sizzling. If they do, I know the oil is hot enough.

Once the shallot starts to become translucent and give off its lovely shallot aroma, add the grated zucchini. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything, and then pour the white wine in.

Let the zucchini cook until the white wine has evaporated. While it's cooking, crumble or chop the chevre into smallish chunks. Once the wine has pretty much all evaporated, add in the cheese and the milk/cream. Stir everything up and drain the pasta, if you haven't already (you should be testing to see if it's done while preparing the sauce and drain it the minute it stops being raw in the center). Add the pasta into the sauce, stirring everything up again so the pasta is well-coated.

Serve warm and enjoy!