Recipe: Tuna and Tortellini

I honestly don’t use cookbooks much anymore (well, I have the More With Less and one that was a wedding present from relatives which are great). Most of my recipes come from online (I’ve even taken to saving them to my del.icio.us as a cookbook of sorts). I’ll search my Google Reader for “recipe” or I’ll click through the many recipe sites.

What’s best is that I’m gaining confidence to adapt recipes. 🙂 And with that, I present my adapted recipe for Tuna and Torellini.

Ingredients:

– 2 bags frozen tortellini (or one big bag)

– 2 large cans of tuna

– lots of broccoli (big bag of frozen stuff or a few bunches of fresh)

– 2 cups uncooked brown rice, 4 cups water

– 1 or 2 cans chopped mushrooms (or buy fresh and chop yourself)

– butter

– 1 really big pot

Start the rice cooking in a separate pot for about 45 minutes or until water is gone. Follow the instructions on cooking the tortellini. Cut the broccoli (or use pre-cut). Bring broccoli to a boil and them simmer for about 5 minutes or until done to taste. If mushrooms are fresh, boil along with broccoli and a little salt. If canned, put them in for the last minute or so. Drain broccoli/mushrooms.

Drain tuna.

Mix rice, tortellini, broccoli, mushrooms, and tuna together in the big pot/saucepan. You can time this so everything’s still hot, but if some ingredients have gotten cold, just add a little water and stir on low for 5 minutes.
Serve with a very little melted butter on top if you’re not worried about calories. This recipe serves 2 people with about 7 meals.

My thoughts: To really succeed, this recipe needs a lot of broccoli. Otherwise it’s just too white and plain. It could probably work with some other veggies like green beans, but we love broccoli. 🙂 Tuna has its faults, but if you eat it as infrequently as we do (probably not for 4 months) it’s not a big deal.

– this is the original recipe, which takes even less time but is more pre-packaged

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