Budget cooking: the tastiest recipes with canned tuna
Stretching your last bit of money just before your salary comes in can be a challenge. You do want to eat well, after all. Fortunately, a can of tuna can take you a long way.
If you really don’t have a penny to spare, go for the absolute cheapest variety, but our favorite is the tuna from Fish Tales. It’s a euro more expensive, but for an entire meal for two, that doesn’t make much difference.
Indonesian
FavorFlav’s Renée’s favorite dish: fry 2 finely chopped shallots, 1–2 finely chopped cloves of garlic, 1 red chili and a little trassi in a wok. Add 1–2 tomatoes (cut into small cubes), a little tomato purée and gula djawa (palm sugar), and fry for a little longer. Add canned tuna and fry until crispy, season with pepper and salt and, if desired, sambal.
This is the most basic version of the dish. If you have some money left over or happen to have yardlong beans or green beans at home, add them to the wok at the same time as the shallots and garlic. Green beans are too thick and should be blanched first, but flat beans can go straight into the pan raw. Serve with rice and (pickled) cucumber.
Salade niçoise
You may associate salade niçoise with a bland meal in a mediocre restaurant, but if you make it properly, it’s a truly delicious meal. Because it contains potatoes, it’s much more filling than your average salad. The anchovies and olives provide a distinctive, salty flavor. The proper way to prepare a salade niçoise is a hotly debated topic. Those discussions have never stopped the people of Nice from continuing to make this salad the way it should be. How? Here’s how to make a salade niçoise the Nice way.
Tuna melt
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having bread for dinner now and then. Especially not when it’s an incredibly filling tuna melt. The basics are bread, tuna, mayonnaise and cheese, but you can go as wild as you like. For the tuna salad, mayonnaise and tuna are enough, but you can also add a shallot, celery or a squeeze of lemon juice. And pepper and salt, of course.
Do you still have tomatoes or jalapeños at home? They would also be delicious on your sandwich. I like making my tuna melt in a toasted sandwich maker, but you can also top two slices of bread and grill them in the oven until the cheese bubbles. It all depends on what you like. Make a top-notch tuna melt with these top tips!
Soup
A hearty soup with cannellini beans (also incredibly cheap), kale and canned tuna. Make a very large pot of it, and you can feed an entire family for a few euros.
Bean salad
If you happen to have an extra can of beans at home, make the Italian dish fagioli con tonno e cipolla. It sounds very fancy, but it’s nothing more than beans, tuna and onion. Mix with some olive oil, pepper and salt, and some parsley if your budget still allows for a bunch. Serve with bread and you’ve got the poor person’s meal of a lifetime.
Pasta with tuna
If you’re a little lucky, all you need to buy for this pasta is arugula, and the rest is already in your pantry. Extra cheap, in other words. You don’t need anything more than some lemon, garlic and chili flakes.
Pastries
Crispy fried dough filled with tuna. Mmmm, sometimes nothing beats a good pastechi. If you eat enough of this snack, you’ll have a proper meal in no time. This recipe makes 25 delicious Antillean pastries—be careful not to eat them all at once.
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