My husband’s bachelor go-to meal.
When I first met my husband he definitely didn’t seduce me with his ability to cook. Being a bachelor for many years, he at best ‘coped’ in the kitchen and that’s about it. He to this day jokes that he wouldn’t have married me if I was unable to cook! That gives you an idea of how little he mastered cooking himself. In saying that though, there were two dishes he could do really well – pasta sauce, and crunchy tuna salad. I’ll admit that I learnt to make pasta sauce from my husband. After all, he was part Italian so I knew this was something he learnt as part of his upbringing and heritage. But the salad… this was all him.
We love having salads for lunch. I make many different varieties but this is our quick and easy go-to salad when we’re especially time-poor and needing a quick nutritional fix.
While I have made this crunchy tuna salad from scratch before, we normally buy the pre-made crunchy salad from any of the supermarkets in Australia – Woolworths, Coles or Aldi. It makes this salad so convenient and easy to make. Just don’t think I’ll be doing that again. Only four days ago a lady in Sydney found an alive huntsman spider inside her salad packet so I’m almost permanently put off buying bagged salad. Eeek!
The portion size of this is fairly large so make sure you’re very hungry when making it. Also, this isn’t something we would give to the kids. I can imagine my two daughters turning their noses up at it because it has spicy tuna as they’re both not too keen on anything spicy.
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Crunchy Salad Tuna
Ingredients
- ¼ to ½ cabbage, sliced into strips, depending on size of cabbage
- 1 medium carrot, grated
- 1 small red onion, sliced
- 1 spring onion/shallot, sliced
- 1 long red chilli, seeds removed & finely sliced
- fresh parsley, roughly chopped (optional)
- 185 g tin of tuna, chilli tuna is our preference
- 40 g crispy noodles
- 3 tablespoons thousand island dressing
- 1 lemon, (optional)
Instructions
- Mix all ingredients together.
- Best served immediately. You can squeeze lemon juice on here also if you want extra zing to your salad.
Notes
- Add sunflower or pumpkin seeds for extra texture and crunch.
- For a change, try this salad also with cucumber or red cabbage.
- Sometimes thousand island salad dressing is sold as seafood sauce.