Tuna with fresh herbs and slow-roasted tomatoes.

Pour les lecteurs francophones : non, mon blog n’a pas basculé en anglais pendant la nuit. Il reste en français à l’exception de cet article. Si vous avez un pb de traduction, n’hésitez pas à m’envoyer un mail.

This is my contribution to the 5th food blog event “Is my blog burning” hosted today by Wena from Malaysia. She writes a food blog called mum-mum. The theme today is “Fish”.

Can you imagine that is my fourth contribution to this event ? After the “tartine edition” hosted by Clotilde, the “cake walk” hosted by Renee and “Around the world in a bowl of rice” hosted by Pim, I’m back today with the fish edition. The idea came from Alberto with the first edition on soups which I missed.

A couple of weeks ago, we had our friends Laurence and Guillaume for dinner on a Friday evening. Laurence works for the same company as David and me and Guillaume is an architect who does also water-colours which are fantastic. For some reason I decided to go for a light dinner.

When I think about light dinner I always think fish. Tuna is perhaps not the best example but I love it.

For the starter we had hot and sour soup with prawns from a Nigella Lawson book which was really good. This is something I often cook just for David and me. It was the first time I served it for friends and they were really happy with it. I must think about writing a post about it even if Pim has already done it.

For the main course we had tuna. I wanted to serve it with slow-roasted tomatoes and rice but just after I put rice and water in the bowl of our new rice-cooker, I realised that the rice cooker was broken (already !) which meant we had tuna with only the slow-roasted tomatoes. It was really good and we did not miss the rice at all.

Guillaume loves cooking and he’s the best male cook I’ve ever known (sorry David !). He’s always watching while I cook which used to make me nervous when I didn’t know him very well. Now we can spend hours talking about cooking and food which sometime annoys Laurence and David even if they are too kind to say anything.

For dessert we had Vino Santo with Cantucci. Laurence had them a long time ago (with an Italian ex boy friend ?) and it was like her “Madeleine de Proust”.

I love to invite people and serve them something which really makes them happy.

Sometimes, even when you don’t know someone very well, just by accident you serve them something they really enjoy and for me that’s the joy of cooking !

For the tuna I used the Jamie Oliver recipe from his first book “The Naked Chef” that David kindly bought for me some time ago.

For the slow-roasted tomatoes, that’s my inspiration ...

To drink with it, we had a Chardonnay which I tried recently and found very good. It’s colour is quite yellow as the wine is aged in an oak barrel.

I bought it in Nicolas’s wine shop on the advice of the owner’s wife. She’s a very nice lady and each time I buy a bottle of wine following her advice it’s always very good. She knows a lot about wine, gives very good advice but does not show off using all the vocabulary that you don’t always understand.

For 4 persons :

For the tuna

I’ve doubled the quantities of everything except the fish, I used powdered coriander instead of whole and lime instead of lemon.
I didn’t use any salt nor pepper as it is tasty enough for me with the spices and herbs but you can if you wish.

2 small dried red chillies
2 tbsp of powdered coriander
1 glove of garlic
2 good handful of basil, picked and finely chopped
1 good handful of fresh coriander, picked and finely chopped
juice of 2 limes
4 tuna steaks, 200 g each, about 2 cm thick each

Smash up the chilli in a pestle and mortar.

Add the powdered coriander, garlic, basil, coriander and lemon juice to taste.

Mix together.

Lay out your tuna steaks on a tray, season both sides if you wish and rub the herb mixture on to each side.

Keep in the refrigerator a couple of hours.

Remove from the refrigerator 30 min before starting cooking.

Rub your pan which should be very very hot with a little oil on a piece of kitchen paper then put in the tuna. Leave them 1 minute to 1 minutes 30 on each side. Don’t overcook them as they will get dry.

I’ve cooked the one on the picture 1 min 30 on each side and they were 2 cm thick.

To succeed with this recipe you really need to have good quality fresh tuna. The one I bought, and I was really happy with it, came from a fishmonger at the Nogent Sur Marne market.

For the tomatoes

4 vines of cherry tomatoes or two if there’re big.
Olive oil and sugar
Put the tomatoes on a tray. Drizzle some olive oil and some sugar.
Put in the oven, marked 100°C and cooked for one hour and a half.

This is the perfect meal for a summer evening with friends.