Easy tuna tomato sauce

Raining again this morning, but at least it's not snow. We're hoping the rain won't become snow tomorrow either, because that's our big market day. We have to drive over to Montrichard (10 miles west) to pick up the turkey and buy some sprouts or other green vegetable.

A few days ago I saw a TV chef (Eric Léautey on French CuisineTV) making some pasta sauces. The one that attracted me, both because it seems unusual and it reminds me of a recipe I used to make in Paris back in the 1970s, was a sauce tomate au thon to be served with pasta. It's a great dish for a gray winter day.

I get really hungry just looking at this photo.
It even looks kind of Christmas-y.

Years ago, I had a recipe out a long-gone book (where did that book go, anyway, and which one was it?) that was called Tuna Provençal. Or Provençale. In the book it was in English, I'm sure. It used canned tuna, tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, and herbs like thyme and rosemary. I think I remember it being served with rice.

That's exactly the sauce Eric Léautey made on his show the other day. I didn't get his recipe and haven't yet found it on the www.cuisine.tv web site. I found similar recipes on other web sites, however, and they are all very similar to each other.

The olives are optional, really, but so good if you like them.

One advantage of a recipe like this is that it is so fast to prepare. It's ready in 10 or 15 minutes, about the amount of time it takes to cook the pasta. Here's the recipe:

Sauce tomate au thon

3 cups of tomato purée or sauce
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, trimmed and diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped or crushed
1 Tbsp. dried thyme
(some fresh basil and rosemary if available)
salt and black pepper to taste
½ tsp. cayenne pepper (or a squirt of harissa)
15 or 20 olives, green or black, pitted or not
1 or 2 small tins of tuna, flaked

Sauté the onion and green pepper together in olive oil. Add the tomato purée or sauce (and adjust the quantity). Stir in the parsley, salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. Add the tuna (about 200 grams or 6 oz.) and finally the olives. As soon as it's heated through and starting to simmer, it's ready.

If you use tuna packed in olive oil, use that olive oil to make the sauce. If you use tuna packed in water, put some of the tuna water into the sauce (but taste it for saltiness first). The better the tuna, the better the sauce, of course. Same goes for the tomato sauce or puree. Of course canned tomatoes could be very good, and fresh tomatoes, in season, even better. La sauce tomate au thon is more an idea than a recipe, really.

August? Ha!

Okay, Walt built a fire in the wood stove yesterday afternoon. On August 10! We are not exactly having a heat wave. I guess this is a summer for the history books. The non-summer summer.

I read about all of you people on the East Coast sweltering in temperatures approaching or even exceeding 100ºF. Our high temperature yesterday was 17.2ºC — that's 63ºF. We've had only three days so far in August when the temperature reached 75ºF. Those days felt hot because it got up to 80º, and one day it hit 85º. But that just makes all the other days seem that much colder.

One garden success this year has been the artichokes.
There are three of them on this plant.

People are complaining about the weather, but the optimists point out that we often have une belle arrière saison here in Saint-Aignan — that means nice warm weather in September and October, the "back season." I'm afraid the only summer we might have this year will have to be an Indian Summer.

We have also had close to an inch of rain this week. Luckily, artichokes like cool, gray weather — that's why so many of them are grown in Brittany and along the northern California coast. Ours are one of the few bright spots in our garden this summer. If we can figure out how to protect the plants from freezing this winter, we might have a decent crop of artichokes next year.

Yesterday I actually picked half a dozen little red tomatoes out in the garden. They don't look very healthy, but we'll try to eat them today to see if they are any good at all. We are getting zucchinis and cucumbers, and there are a lot of pumpkins out in the pumpkin patch. We are also getting some nice haricots verts from the few plants that survived the damp chilly weather in June and July.

Sushi master at work

Yesterday Walt made some more sushi rolls for lunch. We had a ripe avocado left, and another cucumber from the garden. We had some shrimp in the freezer, and there was sushi rice left over from a couple of days before. And we have plenty of nori sheets — that's the seaweed you wrap the rice rolls in. Walt is becoming an ace at sushi making, which is supposed to be hard to master.

Just as we sat down to lunch, somebody rang the front bell. It was Gisèle stopping by just to say hi before she went to the neighbors' for lunch. We showed her the sushi rolls. I'm not sure she had ever seen them before or knew what they were, but she said she was against the idea of eating raw fish. We told her we made our with cooked shrimp this time.

Some recipe said to put a sheet of plastic wrap between the sushi mat
and the nori sheet, but the plastic just got in the way.
It's better to roll up the susi directly on the mat.

"You bought these, right?" she said. "Vous ne les avez pas faits..." You didn't make them yourselves. Yes we did, we told her. They are rice, cucumber, avocado, and shrimp wrapped in algae sheets. Seaweed? I showed her the nori sheets in their package. She didn't look too enthusiastic. I guess we should have a sushi party for our local friends. I'm sure they would like it if they tried it.

These were the first rolls Walt made. He said he used too much
rice and not enough cucumber, avocado, and shrimp in these.
I thought they were delicious.

Next time, I'm going to buy fish. I'll ask the fish monger at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan for some sushi-grade salmon or tuna. That's what a fellow blogger (Amy H.'s blog topic about it is here) who lives over on the other side of Tours did. The fish stand in Saint-Aignan has high-quality fish and shellfish, and I'm sure the woman who runs it will sell us good fish that can be eaten uncooked.