Tuna Portabella Pasta Sauce

This dish is based loosely on a recipe my mom used to make, but for some reason the recipe wasn’t in Sarah’s Big Blue Book of Recipes, which is basically the family recipe gospel. The original Blue Book was just a binder full of recipes my mom got from magazines, ingredient boxes, family members, or the Internet. Now it’s two binders. Plus several more editions: mine, my sister’s, and an extremely abridged version used by a friend teaching English in Japan. Mine started out one Christmas as a binder full of photocopies from the original and has since been added to.

But long story short, the tuna fish recipe isn’t in it, because I didn’t find it in Mom’s.

I’m sure I could’ve googled something similar, but instead I decided to wing it. And I think it turned out pretty darned good.

What You’ll Need

16 oz pasta of your choosing

2 T olive oil

6 cloves garlic, minced

16 oz portabella mushrooms

½ cup cooking sherry

28 oz canned crushed tomatoes

12 oz tomato paste

8 oz canned tuna

½ T fresh parsley

What to Do

Get some water boiling for the pasta and prepare according to package directions. In the meantime, put the oil in a saucepan on medium heat and add the garlic. Sauté until the garlic starts spitting just a little bit. Add the mushrooms and sherry, cover, and turn the heat to low. Simmer for 10 minutes while the mushrooms get all brown and soft and give off delicious mushroom gravy.

(I thought an entire pound package of portabellas would be too much, but they cook down sort of a lot.)

Once the mushrooms are done simmering, add the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, tuna, and fresh parsley. Simmer until warmed through or until your pasta is done cooking, whichever comes last. In my case, I simmered it for a good long while because I had a big ass pot of water taking forever to boil so I got to this point before I even put the pasta on (even though I started the water right at the beginning). Probably it’s better the longer you simmer it anyhow, so my suggestion is to let it go as long as you can.

Serve over pasta and enjoy some leftovers for lunch. Voila! Simple, delicious, and reasonably healthy.

Well, obviously it was simple. I made it, didn’t I?