Recipe Monday: Pasta with tuna sauce

..or, as our Italian friends call it "al tonno"!
I put a lot of veggies into the sauce for a really balanced meal.

First, you prepare and cut up the vegetables. Think onions, peas, carrots, bell peppers, celery- whatever catches your fancy and can be cut up in small pieces. I admit to being lazy and using pre-cut frozen vegetable mix and onion cubes.
Stir-fry these in a bit of olive oil until they begin to get tender. Add some olives, some diced peperoni if you have any (again, to taste- I guess jalapenos would be too hot), season with dried oregano, add some concentrated tomatoes (you can get these packaged in a tube) and a bit of water so the ingredients will mix well. Drain a can of water-packed tuna, add to the mix, and allow to simmer at a low temperature with the lid closed. Stir regularly in between to avoid the sauce sticking to the pot. Season with chili powder to taste.
In the meantime, cook a sufficient amount of pasta ( I prefer spirelli) to taste in a bigger pot. Drain, then mix with the sauce and serve.
For good measure, you can put a bit of grated parmesan cheese on top. 
I use the pot the pasta was cooked in for mixing, so, I take one that´s big enough to hold both the cooked pasta and the sauce, with some room to spare.
The good thing about this is that you can stock all of the ingredients in your pantry and freezer, and preparing it with those frozen prepared veggies takes about twenty minutes. It tastes not at all fishy because of the oregano and chili powder, and can also be used for using up those last vegetables in the crisper.
If you don´t like to use tuna, a similar dish may be prepared with cubed pieces of chicken breast (fry them until done first, then add the veggies etc. into the same pot) or even with cubed bacon, or for the vegetarians out there with tofu or feta cheese (though you should add the latter only directly to the dishes when serving to avoid it sticking to the pots).

Enjoy!

Julia