Pasta with tuna, lemon and caper sauce

 

Some meals are pantry friendly. This one adores your pantry.

Orecchiette with tuna, lemon and caper sauce

From “The Essential Pasta Cookbook”by Whitecap Books. This compilation has a truly staggering number of pasta recipes, every one of which I've tried over the years has been a keeper. For a pre-Instagram era cookbook,this 1998 gem is amazingly photo-driven. It's also refreshingly celebrity-chef free, only listing the recipe developers and testers in the credits in the back of the book.

Note: The recipe calls for tuna in brine, which doesn't tend to be on your standard American grocery store shelf, much less in my pantry. I added just a smidge of the caper brine to the sauce to compensate for that flavor note. It was spot-on.

 Ingredients

1 pound orecchiette

1 ounce butter

1 garlic clove, crushed

1 onion, finely chopped

14 ounces canned tuna in brine, drained

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 cup cream

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, divided

1 tablespoons capers, drained (but add a touch of brine if you're not using brined tuna)

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Method

Cook pasta in boiling salted water until al dente. Drain.

Meanwhile, heat the butter in a large skillet. Cook garlic and onion for 2 minutes. Add tuna, lemon juice, cream, half the parsley, capers and cayenne. Simmer over low heat for about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss with cooked orecchiette. Serve garnished with remaining parsley.

Rating: Really quite tasty, and so simple and fast to fix. Perfect pantry-friendly meal. This hits all the right flavor notes and prep points. As Dave noted, it's like really, really good tuna and noodles that don't seem at all the same as the glop we witnessed as children.