You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish

Day 2 (Monday)

Breakfast: Overnight oats. Holy shit I forgot how much this recipe makes. This is enough food for three people. It took me three hours to finish it. I will definitely be cutting this in half going forward. 

Lunch: Leftover Greek lemon soup

Again, I forewent the snacks. After all those stupid oats, there was no way I needed them.  

Dinner: I did the Napa cabbage wraps, but I wanted something Asian, so we did stir fry and grilled tuna steaks with quinoa instead of rice. My husband marinated the tuna first. I don’t think you need to, it would be fine just grilled with salt and pepper. As usual, when he cooks things, I’m not sure exactly what he did, but it involved soy sauce, lemon juice, ginger, brown sugar, and green onions. I made the stir fry:

Sauce:

Equal parts soy sauce and chicken stock or water (I used about 3 tbsp each)

Splash of rice vinegar

½ tsp sambal olek

Pinch brown sugar

Napa cabbage wraps:

1 medium carrot, sliced on the bias

1 can baby corn

1 large garlic clove, thinly sliced

Green onions, thinly sliced

Shitake mushrooms, stems removed and sliced

2 cups cooked quinoa

1 head napa cabbage

Whisk all the sauce ingredients together until the brown sugar dissolves. Set aside. Heat some oil on high in a sauté pan. Throw in the carrots and the mushrooms, season them with salt and pepper. Let them cook until the mushrooms are browned and almost done cooking. Throw in the baby carrots and cook them until they get some color. Add a little more oil, make some space in the center and cook the garlic until golden (don’t burn the garlic). Throw in the green onions, toss quickly, throw in the sauce. The sauce only needs to cook for legit 2 seconds. If you leave the heat on it it will just evaporate, so toss everything together, count to ten, and turn off the burner. Let the veggies sit for a while.

Meanwhile, grill your tuna steaks. I like them rare, so they only need a couple minutes on each side to get a good sear. Take them off and let them rest for a couple minutes, then slice them thin.

Remove however many outer leaves from the head of cabbage you want (I used 3). Rinse them off if you want to. Put about a third of a cup of quinoa into each, then some veggies and sauce, top with your sliced tuna. This made enough for two people, with some leftover veggies which I will eat tomorrow for lunch.

I have an absolutely horrible phone camera, so this is the best picture I could get. I put some hoisin on the one on the right, which I know is verboten, not being ‘clean’, but I maintain that it was a freaking good addition:

Lessons for today:

1. After a month of -10 degree wind chills, 45 degrees is positively balmy

2. Having spent most of my adult life entirely incapable of making decent stir fry, I finally figured out that I should just make the sauce first so that I can taste it before I ruin an entire meal with it. I had to throw out my first attempt for having so much vinegar my eyes were watering.

3. I hate applying for jobs more than anything else on the planet. Except maybe raw onions. I hate raw onions.