Italian-Style Tuna with Beans & Tomato! Quick, Healthy and Tasty Lunch – Stanley Tucci Inspired!

Let Nidia show you how easy it is to make a delicious and healthy lunch!

Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Welcome back to Dwayne and Needi’s food travel and fun. And today we’re going to be making a very quick lunch, a very healthy quick lunch um from an idea that I got from Stanley Tui’s Instagram. Yes, he has an Instagram and Stanley Coochie is one cool guy. If you’ve ever seen his travels through Italy where he shows off some of the cooking of each region, he’s a real foodie and I really like his ideas. So, he recently posted a picture of himself very recently um eating a very quick protein forward or proteinbased lunch that he made before getting on a plane to go film uh the second part of uh the Devil Wears product, the sequel. So, I’m going to try and replicate that here today with a few Dwayne and mediaisms, of course. So, first thing I’m going to do here is just use a little bit of olive oil. And I will go through the ingredients. See how it sprays. I’m actually not going to use a lot. Um because I do have some tuna that is in the olive oil. So that’s my handy dandy olive oil. Let’s talk about what you need to make this bean and tuna tomato recipe. And if you don’t like tuna, hot tuna, a tuna with tomatoes, it’s a big thing in Italy and it really is delicious. Don’t knock it till you try it. All right. First thing you’re going to do is you’re going to need olive oil. You just saw me pour it. Second thing is you’re going to need about two cans, and I’m making this recipe for, you know, at least two, three servings. Two cans of a very good tuna. Tuna that is either um, you know, in olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. I I just happen to have found this one recently. These are tuna fillets, but you can certainly find the better, more premium types of tuna. But hey, if you like albaore packed in water, this will still work. Just add the olive oil and add your seasonings. It’ll be fine. So, to this, you’ll definitely need some garlic. For the beans, you can use Great Northern, also known as canaloney. You can also use butter beans. And I am using butter beans. Two cans of butter beans. And I did drain them, but did not soak them or rinse them. I wanted a little bit of that beanie residue to them to thicken things. I am using one can of petite diced tomatoes. You can certainly use fresh. And when I do use fresh, I use a mix of cherry tomatoes and regular Roma tomatoes. And I make my own tomato sauce out of the fresh tomatoes. Today, I’ve got a couple of other things going on. We’re okay with the canned. You’re going to need some red pepper of your choice, a little bit of tomato sauce for some sweetness, um some salt and pepper as usual, and a splash of red wine vinegar. And to all of this, I have previously diced one yellow onion and one uh roasted red pepper. That is it. Let me change the camera angle and show you how quick this one skillet meal comes together for a very quick lunch, quick dinner. Um, you’ll see. So easy. You’re going to want to give this one a try. Okay, so here we go. First, I’m going to turn on this. And that is the olive oil you saw me pour just a little while ago. 500. Let’s get this in here. And while that is heating, I’m going to open up these two very fancy cans of tuna. I don’t know why. It could be a lot cheaper if they sold it in just a tin can underneath. I think we’re paying for the packaging as much as we’re paying for the actual um tin that it comes in. And it comes very much like the tins in Europe do for their tuna and fancy sardines. I find this brand at Whole Foods. That’s the only place I have found it other than through its own website, Natural Catch. It’s absolutely fabulous. I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. So, these cans are just about ready. I will prep them so they’re very easy to put in at the right moment. I bought one spicy yellow tail and one regular. These both have a Spanish olive oil in them. Now I’m going to add in the garlic and I like things garlicky. So I, you know, I would use the um fresh garlic that I have, but I mean, you know, this is a quick lunch. I wanted to try to focus on the quick lunch aspect. So let’s get that olive oil and that garlic kind of together. There you go. Put that up a little higher. As soon as you can smell that garlic and you see the smoke, then you know you’re ready. I’m going to add in my can of petite diced tomatoes. This one happens to be um flavored with basil and maybe a little garlic already. Speaking of basil, this is going to need basil. And I didn’t. Take it out. I’m going to add the basil to the tomatoes. There you go. Let’s let that heat up for a little bit. And because it takes a little while to cook, I will add my one medium sized yellow onion. And the roasted red peppers are already roasted. I bought the jar kind. I love the flavor. Sundried tomatoes would also work. What else? Um, you could use fresh bell pepper. But let’s get this in here. And let’s soften the onions with the garlic with the olive oil and give it a few. And what I will do right now is I will add a little of the tomato paste. I really like using the jars when I’m making big recipes. the jars, excuse me, the cans, the little skin cans. But these tubes are so convenient because you can use it from recipe to recipe. I have about two tablespoons of tomato paste that I’m going to incorporate into this tomato sauce. Now, so far we have garlic, onion, olive oil, and tomatoes. Tastes like the base of a very, very good sauce. And the onions do need to soften. You will want those onions softened before you move on to adding anything else. What I have not added outside of the garlic and the basil so far is a little salt. I’ll do that now. You’re going to want to liberally salt this before we put the beans in and then taste it again. The beans do tend to soak up some of that uh flavor. There we go. Now it’s getting nice and hot. And now the onions should start cooking away. As these onions stew away, I’m going to add about two about 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar for that acid. The tomatoes are acidic, but I did add some tomato paste. So, I’m trying to balance it before I put the tuna and certainly before I put something as starchy as the beans in this mix. Definitely can smell the basil here, though. Here we go. Now, people ask me, “Do you just eat this by itself?” In Stanley Tui’s Instagram, he actually had Italian um crusty bread, you know, one big whole loaf that he I think cut slices of and toasted. and they were very toasty hunks of bread and he actually threw it in his plate. So after he spooned the mixture when it was done into a bowl like plate, he put crusty bread chunks in them and it looked fantastic. Um, I suppose you could pour the whole thing over rice, over uh riced cauliflower if you’re trying to watch your carbs, over um gosh, quinoa perhaps, couscous perhaps. I mean, I think you can pour a mixture like this over anything or just eat it plain. Let’s check on those onions. Yeah, they’re still a little crunchy. You want to have some crunch to this since you’ll be eating it um kind of like a a bowl of salad maybe is what I’m thinking of it, but not not so much that it still has that raw bite. So, you definitely want to cook these onions up. While I’m waiting for those onions to cook up, I can add cuz I like Oh, these I do like my cherry peppers. I’m going to add some cherry peppers in here for a little extraing and zing. If you don’t like the taste of these or they’re too much for you, leave them out or put them in for the flavor, but just don’t eat the actual peppers themselves. I find the peppers taste good. And if it’s kind of baked into all this, it does impart a very nice tang. And you know how I am about the tang tang and zing. I don’t remember if I put crushed bread yet, but even if I did, it doesn’t matter. We like it. Especially with tuna and in our beans. You really can use beans for almost anything. So healthy. It is a complex carbohydrate. It does have protein in it. It’s not a complete protein plant-based source of um nutrition like a uh like quinoa is for example, but legumes, beans of every type, very clean, very good, very inexpensive, and you can eat it with or without meat. In this case, we are eating it with fish. Speaking of beans, I will want these to soften a little bit. Although, I did buy pre-cooked. Now, everything I’m adding in here, these butter beans or any other bean that I could have chosen, including the canalone, also known as great white, which I didn’t realize until recently that canalone and great white are the same bean, and that uh that’s basically just a white kidney bean. You could also use kidney beans. I chose butter beans because I had them at home. I was going to make uh Cajun style butter beans, the kind that they serve at Willie May’s famous fried chicken place in uh New Orleans where they make the butter beans. They put over rice and it’s very Cajuny and very good. But uh anyway, I put the beans in so the beans can get warm, do their magic bean stuff. All right, you can see things are starting to uh thicken up. Starting to have that really nice Italian tomato smell to it. Getting very close. Wow. Thickening up. And really good. Time for the tuna. This tuna comes almost in what they say is hand sliced fililelets in a Spanish olive oil. This is how the tuna comes. Like it’s almost like a a fillet a portion. It doesn’t smell or taste fishy at all. This is the spicy one. You can see it had a little pepper in it and it has a very peppery oil with the chili. And here I go. And I’m mixing up those big hunks of tuna. This may seem, folks, like an odd combination for those of us who maybe are not um introduced to eating hot fish or or fish with pasta or fish of especially canned tinned fish like they are in Europe. I can assure you that if you go to Europe, um you get tuna on everything. tuna with pasta, tuna on pizza, tuna with everything. And I am Portuguese as you all know and we put our fish in anything and we cook it anyway. If you want to replace the tuna with any other seafood, I think you can. But I’m just a I’m a nut for for like tuna cooked like this. Then again, I always liked the stuff that even here as a kid, the tuna noodle casserole things. All right, let’s let this settle for a bit and taste it. It’s just about done. All right. Well, it seems done. I have not tasted the onion or checked, but the onion is translucent. I know that even though I’m going to shut this off now, it will continue to soften a little bit since it’s so hot. But yeah, let’s spoon it up and give it a try. So, let’s see what it tastes like. Maybe I’ll come and give you a closer look, too. [Music] Really good. Very good on the salt. Definitely has enough pepper. This one’s ready to go. Give you a closer look. That’s what it looks like. Really, really good. So folks, that’s all today from Dwayne Media um food travel and fun. We have a beautiful meal here. My mom’s going to enjoy this. I’m going to enjoy this. Share it with my sister. Healthy. Um really good. Very clean. The only thing that’s not as clean as it could be is I could have used um fresh garlic. Could have used fresh tomatoes. I guess it’s not that clean, but pretty clean. Um I didn’t put any processed foods in here. The beans are okay. The tomatoes are okay. Nothing pre-made, nothing, you know. So, we’re good. Um, that’s it. If you like this recipe, let me know. If there’s anything else you want to see me try and make here from our kitchen with Dwayne and media, let us know. Thank you so much for the support, especially of late when we’ve uh had to slow down some of our content a little bit for different reasons, but we’ll be back with more fun, adventure, and food. Thank you. [Music]