Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes & Tuna

a FAST pasta using ingredients you may already have

Cherry tomatoes and I have a bit of a love hate relationship. They always look pretty at the store or farmers market but then I get them home and they inevitably sit on the counter and die, never to be used. Does anyone else have this issue? I don’t actually particularly love them, raw at least. I DO love them cooked and the way that they make a very flavorful sauce very quickly. It also always seems that in the summer I’m inundated with them. Both from my own purchasing efforts and then given as gifts from sweet neighbors trying to keep up with their bumper crop in the garden. All to say, It’s good to have a quick recipe in your back pocket that uses up a bunch of them. Here it is…

Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes & Tuna

This pasta does indeed use a ton of them. It also uses up a lot of pantry staples that may be hanging around your kitchen: tuna, capers, olives and pasta. This dish has kind of a funny origin story for me. I was raised by a single dad who really did his best, but being a man and being busy we rarely had a fridge full of food. I’d call him on his way home from work whining about being hungry and there being no food. To which he’d reply, “I’ll make puttanesca! Be home soon!”. Puttanesca is a classic southern Italian pasta made from a lot of these ingredients minus the tuna and capers. And when I got to an age he deemed appropriate (10?) he told me where the name “puttanesca” comes from. He told me it was the prostitutes (pasta a la puttanesca literally translates into “in the style of the whore”) in Italy who needed to make a quick pasta between clients who invented this pantry pasta. He probably knew I’d get a kick out of hearing my Dad say prostitute. As I got older, I started adding tuna because it is a pantry protein I typically have on hand. The recipe is at the bottom of this email. There is a paywall to view the recipe. To become a subscriber it costs either $5 a month or $40 a year. This gives you access to ALL the subscriber only recipes and it helps fund the content here, which costs money to make. To see the recipe made in action, check out the “Reels” section of my instagram. 

What I’m Loving This Week:

1. Liverwurst: Oh, it’s not only this week. It’s been a lifelong love. I know most people would never, but I am a huge fan. This week I had a slice of toasted sourdough, Hellmans mayo, a few slices of liverwurst, a few slices of tomato, s&p, and basil. There’s a very good Polish butcher in my town that makes their own Liverwurst. All liverwurst is not created equally so I would try to seek out the best quality you can find. 

2. Trader Joes Hair Serum: You may have caught on here that not only am I a big Trader Joes food shopper but I am very fond of their personal care products. It’s very strange but they somehow manage to have really high quality products, that have minimal chemicals in them, for very good prices. The hair serum has proved to be the same. I have been air drying my hair a lot more which, for me, creates a lot of frizz and “puffiness”. I’ve been putting this hair serum in my air while it’s damp and I’ve noticed it’s a lot sleeker once dry.