Last week was a long one. Going the store after work for dinner ingredients seemed about as enticing as forgoing my evening at home for another round of meetings. Lucky for our bank account, my frequent inability to face a checkout line leads us to what we should be doing: eating what’s already in the house. This dilemma is what weaned me off a reliance on recipes in the first place. What we have in the house doesn’t always naturally go together but that’s part of the fun of it. It’s like being on that British cooking show where two hapless home cooks show up with a bag of items they tend to buy at the store and two equally hapless chefs have to battle it out by creating easy, tasty dinners combining ingredients like zucchini, potato chips and mayonnaise. Zucchini knows not to darken my door so that wasn’t an issue for us but we did have a lovely package of endives from our CSA (community supported agriculture) box that had to be used. Expensive and threatening to wilt, they stared us down, taunting us with their ability to turn bad the following day and leave us with the visual of our CSA dollars floating away never to be seen again.
It’s not like endive is that hard to use. It makes a great salad, it’s great for dips and there’s an amazing looking braised endive and grape recipe in one of my new cookbooks that I’m dying to try. But I didn’t have grapes and we weren’t in the mood to make more than one thing as it was already creeping past 8 pm. That’s when canned tuna and our fairly impressive selection of condiments came to the recipe. The result: an Asian twist on tuna salad, floating merrily in endive boats.
Tuna Floats in an Endive Boat
Note: We served this as our main course for a post-workout dinner but it could serve 4 as a light meal.
Two cans water-packed tuna
1 small cucumber, diced (You could also use celery–it’s just nice to have something crunchy)
1 1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/4 white onion, diced
Handful cilantro, chopped (Cilantro haters could try parsley instead)
Small handful toasted walnuts, chopped
Three endives, leaves separated
Dressing
2 tbsp Schezuan marinade (If you don’t have this, add soy, chili, garlic, ginger and some extra vinegar to your dressing. It won’t be quite the same but it’ll work)
Splash rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp dark sesame oil
1tbsp canola oil
1) Mix your dressing ingredients in a large bowl
2) Add your tuna and chopped veggies and mix well
3) Fold int he walnuts and cilantro
4) Scoop into endive leaves or if you’re lazy, as we were, serve the tuna with the endive leaves on the side and let your diners do their own scooping
Laila Loves Lettuce 