Entries for December, 2006

To Yac2x, thanks. You inspire me.

So this recipe is a first time thing, and there's still room for improvement. But I'll lay the facts for you and you can get the idea. Read to the very end to know what happened. (Thriller!)

The Case of the Tuna Mushroom Penne.

1. Cook the penne (about 250 grams) like you usually do.

2. When the pasta's done you can concentrate on the sauce. Or vice versa. Ahem. So first step to the sauce is: Mushroom soup. The commercial kind. I used Knorr (powdered), but maybe you could try other brands, or maybe even the canned ones. So anyway, add water. Just a little bit , because you don't want soup on your pasta right? You want sauce.

3. When that's done, you mince 2-3 cloves of garlic. Saute in the saucepan.

4. Add thinly-sliced button mushrooms, drained. When you buy this, buy the canned pre-sliced ones. I swear slicing whole mushrooms this thin is torture. You can put as many as you want. Now when I cooked this, I salted the mushrooms.

4. Then open up 1 can of tuna. This time I used the Hot and spicy pre-flavored one. When cooking with this kind of tuna, I use its oil sometimes for the saute because it's the oil that's spicy and I want it that way most of the time. But then there's just too much oil so I drain about 3/4 of the oil away anyway.

5. Add your "soup-mixture" and some evaporated milk.

6. Salt and pepper to taste. You can add some basil too.

Findings:Warning!! Read before you do this at home!

When I cooked this, I had a problem when I added the "soup-mixture" because it kinda evaporated pretty fast and dried the whole sauce up. So I kept on adding the milk but it still dried up fast. I don't really figure what happened. Maybe because I used the powdered soup mix. I'll try it with Campbell's next time.

Now, when I ate the whole thing with the penne, it was salty. It annoyed me. Theories go:
a. The sauce dried up quickly and the salt concentrated.
b. It was pre-flavored tuna.
c. I shouldn't have salted the mushrooms.

Which do you think caused this to happen? (Twilight zone background music)

It was letter b. I remedied the sauce problem when after I got it out of the fire I added milk and sugar, just to balance off the salt. This time nothing dried up so it got sort of creamy. However, it still tasted salty. I isolated each ingredient and found out that the tuna was unbearably salty.

Recommendations:

The next time I'll cook this, what I'll do is:

a. not use hot and spicy tuna. Besides, the spicy effect doesn't go well with penne and mushrooms. I'll use plain tuna in brine.

b. I'll not salt the mushrooms. Although it's been established that it wasn't the mushrooms, I'll just play safe. I have an inclination to think mushrooms absorb a lot. I don't know if it's true though.

c. I'll not use Knorr for this recipe. I will use Campbell's, but it's 3x more expensive.
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So! I hope you learned a lot today. Til next time. Paalam! (ala Batibot)