Tuna Rice: A Recipe

On Sunday I stayed in the house for lunch (the largest meal of the day), something I often try and avoid because being fed three meals a day in the house means engaging in obligatory consumption of large helpings of food spaced quite widely throughout the day, something with which I still struggle since I love snacking!

After eating a sweet corn arepa, scrambled eggs, papaya and corozo juice (which tastes something like a grape-cherry cocktail, like an Ocean-Spray-esque flavor but better) at 8:00 am, at 2:00 pm I gave in and made myself some popcorn (Popcorn here is always old-fashioned style, in a pot with hot oil on the stove, woot). At the sound of all the popping, my abuela walked into the kitchen and accepted a little popcorn…and then told me it was now time for lunch! Figures.

Lunch turned out to be tuna rice with boiled plantains, which I helped cook. Soooo, here for any of those interested, here is the recipe for Barranquillan-style Tuna Rice:

Ingredients:

·         Two cans of dark tuna, stored in oil

·         Half a small tomato, not too ripe

·         A very small onion

·         Two scallion stalks

·         One cup of scrambled eggs (if you have them, leftover from breakfast, etc)

·         A third cup of oil

·         Half a cup of ketchup

·         Five cups of cooked rice

Directions:

Chop onion, tomato, and scallions and sauté in the oil, and if you happen to have butter left over in the arepa pan from breakfast, that can be used as well! Drain oil from tuna cans into the pan, and mix that in, too. When vegetables start to soften, add the tuna and ketchup. Combine and cook over medium heat for a few minutes, until tuna is broken into small pieces and everything has started to sizzle. Add scrambled eggs and rice. Mix well.

At this point, sit in the rocking chair, make some phone calls, and have a little chit chat while tuna rice finishes warming. Then serve with a hunk of boiled ripe plantain*

*This is one of my new favorite ways to eat savory rice dishes. Whether or not I ate large amounts savory rice dishes prior to arrival is a different story, but anyway. When eating something like rice with chicken, or rice with tuna, the custom here is often to take a very ripe plantain, cut it into halves the hotdog or hamburger way, boil it, and serve it with the rice. It’s a little sweet and is a delicious counterpart to the salty, oily, savory rice. The closest I can come to an American equivalent is peanut butter on crackers with chicken soup, always a childhood favorite. Mmm. 

Tuna rice and plantains: