My Pasta Salad

Since there are not many good choices of restaurants around my office and I hate to spend my money on food from convenience stores, I usually take my obento (lunch box) to work everyday.

When I decided to prepare my lunch box for the next day, it was Sunday afternoon. After having a big weekend with only 2 hours of sleep, I couldn't make myself motivated to cook something too complicated but I had to at least cook so that I feel slightly better. Don't you know the feeling?

So what I decided to make, was simple pasta salad.

This is the ingredients that I was going to use;

Red Paprika
Courgette or Broccoli
Can of Tuna
Brown Mushrooms
Onions
Fusilli
Parmesan cheese

However, when I went to my favourite supermarket in my neighbourhood, red paprikas and courgettes were all sold out and broccolis were sold at JPY 280 which I thought ridiculously expensive.

So these are what I bought instead;

Grape Tomatoes instead of Red Paprika
Japanese Cucumbers instead of Courgettes or Broccolis

I firstly drained cucumbers of its juice by adding a bit of salt and leaving them for a while as Japanese cucumbers contain much more water than Western cucumbers.

Before draining.

While leaving the cucumbers let's prepare tomatoes and mushrooms.
Marinate grape tomatoes with extra virgin olive oil, sliced garlic, salt and peppers.
Chopped brown mushrooms with butter and sliced garlic.



Now you put them in the oven!

After leaving the cucumbers for 30 mins and draining its juice by squeezing 3 times, they will look like this;

Pan fry sliced onions with butter and chopped garlic which I didn't take a photo of, but I'm sure you all know how it looks like ;)

Start boiling water for pasta with olive oil and salt, and now it's time to make some source.



Mayonaise, Whole Grain Mustard, Olive Oil used for Tomatoes and Black Pepper.
(I added some more Musturd later though.)

Last time I made this pasta salad, I added a bit of yoghurt and it was good, but for the purpose of keeping them longer, I decided not to use it this time.

Add a can of tuna into the source and give it a good mix. (of course the oil of tuna has been drained.)

Cook the pasta until al dente and put them to the same pot that you used after draining the hot water.
Throw all your cooked ingrediants with the source, but exept the tomatoes.

Mix them well and add some grained parmesan cheese, then add the tomatoes at the end.


Finally it's ready to eat!

Itadakimasu!

It is nice and simple, reccommended to eat as lunch, specially at picnic and BBQs with your friends and family under the sun.

Happy eats!


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