Quick Tuna Salad by Maya Corrigan #Recipe

 A tuna salad sandwich is my go-to lunch when I can't find any leftovers in the fridge. The recipe I shared for Mediterranean tuna salad is my favorite way to use canned tuna, but it involves slicing or dicing celery, peppers, olives, and onions or shallots, and adding mayo and lemon to two different kinds of tuna. On days when I've been working steadily since breakfast and it's 1:30, I suddenly realize my stomach is empty and I want to fill it fast, without spending the time to chop ingredients. 

I was delighted to find a quicker way to make a tuna salad sandwich. Genevieve Ko's recipe for Tzatziki Tuna Salad (New York Times, 5/22/24) included directions for making tzatziki, using full-fat Greek yogurt, diced cucumber, lemon juice, and fresh dill. The recipe suggested the time-saving approach of substituting 1/4 cup of store-bought tzatziki for the homemade version. I had to modify the recipe to make it work with the store tzatziki, as I'll explain below. Here are the ingredients in the modifed version of the recipe.  

Ingredients

1 5-oz can of tuna in olive oil

2 tablespoons of store-bought tzatziki

1 1/2 teaspoons yellow mustard

bread

lettuce

optional: salt and pepper

Drain the tuna and mix it in a bowl with the tzatziki and mustard. Add salt and pepper to taste. (I added no salt and only a few grinds of pepper.)  

The first time I made the recipe, I followed the version in the newspaper, which said to add the oil along with the tuna from the can and to use twice as much tzatziki. I can only assume that the homemade tzatziki is much thicker than the store's version. The tuna came out so soupy and with oil around the edges that I was afraid it might ooze out of the sandwich. 

So I added more tuna--a drained can of tuna in water--to thicken it. That helped, but the tuna salad was still more liquidy than I liked. 

The next time I made the tuna salad with tzatziki, I cut down on the tzatziki and drained as much oil as I could from the can. Without the oil, the tuna had more consistency and fewer calories. For additional flavor, I served Kalamata olives on the side. I could have sliced them into the tuna as I do for the Mediterranean tuna salad, but serving them whole took less time. Altogether, a quick lunch.  

READERS: What do you eat when you want a quick lunch?

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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