Spelt with smoked tuna, cherry tomatoes, and olives

• 10 minutes to prepare • 20 minutes to cook • Serves 4

 

かつおぶし

 

We are working on cooking without recipes recently.
This reminds us that we usually have a whole landscape of pantry basics that have been giving fresh inspiration for improvised meals.
Our special love? Spelt - an ancient grain with a delicious nuttiness and chewy texture. We might substitute it for rice, couscous, and even pasta in some recipes. Here's one improvised recipe that is also a very good example of cooking from the cupboards.

We cook spelt berries here with wine and toss them with a healthy helping of cherry tomatoes, capers and chilli pepper.
Smoked tuna, green olives and parsley round this out into a dish that is filling, satisfying, but also rather healthy. The flavors matured overnight, too, and this was gone all too quick!
Experiment with other jarred and preserved foods! You might try canned tuna, sun-dried tomatoes, and more parsley in another version of this. It would be wonderful with bits of leftover roast chicken and lemon zest and herbs.
Grains like these absorb any flavors you add to them; think of them as a blank canvas for the palette of your cupboards and fresh food from the markets!

Here are ingredients for the 4-serving recipe:

280 g spelt
300 g cherry tomatoes
1 sprig parsley
100 g smoked tuna
10 capers preserved in salt
10 pitted green olives
100 ml white dry wine
1 shallot
1 dry chili pepper
EVO oil
salt

1. Start by cooking the spelt: add the grains to the pressure cooker, along with 1 liter of water and close the lid securely. Bring the cooker to high pressure, and begin timing. The spelt will need 15 minutes since now to be ready
   
2. Meanwhile, wash tomatoes and parsley under running water. Cut cherry tomatoes by half and chop parsley leaves. Keep everything aside
3. Wash capers to remove the salt in which they are preserved, and drain them well
4. Chop olives and capers. Keep aside
5. Cut smoked tuna into pieces, too
6. After the 15-minutes cooking time of spelt grains has passed, let the pressure come down naturally. Once the pressure has dropped, open the lid and check if it is done. If it is, drain the spelt and drop cold water on it
7. In a pan pour 2 tablespoons of EVO oil, add the chopped shallot and braise it until transparent
8. Add tomatoes, capers, dry chilli pepper - cut into small pieces - and the boiled spelt. Pan-fry for a couple of minutes
9. Pour the white wine and let it evaporate
10. Before serving, add green olives and smoked tuna and top with fresh parsley...enjoy!

In the table below Nutrition Facts are detailed for this appetizer. Data is provided per serving.

ねこにかつおぶし - Neko ni katsuobushi*
(Japanese proverb)

*It is like smoked tuna for the cat