Mayo-less tuna salad, Love Beets and pasta with anchovies

A homemade salad of solid light tuna gets most of its flavor from Dijon mustard and fresh lime juice. Sharing the plate are organic beets, Campari Tomatoes and Earthbound Farm salad greens. Just about everything is available from Costco Wholesale.

Editor's note: Today, I discuss a tuna salad with Middle Eastern and Asian Indian spices, cooked organic beets from Costco Wholesale and the robust taste anchovies give to pasta sauce.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Why settle for a humdrum tuna salad dressed with mayo when you can have one flavored with Dijon mustard, fresh lime juice and exotic spices?

Add crunch with chopped sweet pepper, onion, carrot, celery or scallions.

This week, I used green pepper, onion and a little carrot; three cans of Genova Solid Light Tuna in Olive Oil; Dijon mustard to taste; three limes and ground cumin, sumac and garam masala.

If the salad isn't moist enough, add extra-virgin olive oil.

Six 7-ounce cans of Genova yellowfin tuna were $11.89 at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack.

If you are concerned about mercury, you can make this salad with one can of tuna, one of pink salmon and one or two cans of sardines.

Do you love beets?

If you love beets, you'll love refrigerated Love Beets, fully cooked organic beets sold in a 1-kilogram package at Costco Wholesale for $7.99.

There are four ready to eat 8.8-ounce portions in plastic shrink wrap that you cut open with a scissor over a colander to drain the juices.

I slice the beets and dress them with extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

No fuss, no muss.

Organic whole-wheat pasta from Italy in a reduction of red wine, chicken stock, tomato sauce, organic diced tomatoes, chopped garlic and triple-washed greens. The dish looked and tasted good, but there was something missing.

I also used fresh herbs, but didn't have a can of anchovies to give the pasta sauce a robust flavor.

Pasta with anchovies

I felt like pasta and even wanted to assemble my own sauce, but didn't have the can of anchovies that has always lent the dish a distinctive flavor without a hint of the assertive little fish.

Recklessly, I went ahead, and the result was a good plate of pasta, but not a great one.

And I made an entire pound so spent the week being disappointed, shaking my head at several meals and using grated cheese to add flavor.

For one thing, the anchovies are all the sodium I need, even when I drain the oil and rinse them to reduce the salt content of the finished dish.

They go into the boiling sauce and completely disappear, but leave behind their flavor.

For 1 pound of spaghetti, I often open a 32-ounce bottle of one of Costco Wholesale's pasta sauces and add anchovy fillets, red-pepper flakes, dried Italian seasoning and a couple of ounces of extra-virgin olive oil.

Once the drained pasta is added and mixed with the sauce, you can sit down to eat.

Six 2-ounce cans of Season Fillets of Anchovies in Pure Olive Oil were $6.99 at Costco Wholesale.

Love Beets are non-GMO and grown organically in the European Union. They are fully cooked and ready to eat. Nothing is added to the beets.

Go ahead: Make a plate of leftovers

This Greek extra-virgin olive oil from Cyprus turned out to be unusually thick and fruity for such a good value, but extending the turtle-like plastic spout wasn't as easy as it looked, below. A 3-liter can was on sale for $14.99 at the International Food, Wine & Liquor Warehouse in Lodi until Feb. 26.

I had to grasp two sharp, plastic semicircles and pull hard to get the spout to extend fully, front. Even when extended, pouring the oil into a smaller container for use in cooking or to dress salads is a challenge without spilling some.

Putting a meal on the table is much easier when you have a lot of leftovers to work with.

Making 2 cups of organic brown rice or 1 pound of whole-wheat pasta with sardines takes about as much time as lesser amounts.

Make a 10-inch frittata, not an 8-inch one, leaving some for quickly reheating in the microwave for another meal.

You can also make mashed sweet potatoes in a large batch.

We usually get 2 pounds or less of fresh, wild-caught fish fillets from Costco, and even with four fish-lovers to feed, we have leftovers for another day.

Leftovers for breakfast this morning included a frittata with pesto, Chinese takeout vegetables, sauteed cabbage with sweet peppers and Kabocha squash drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil.

Leftover organic brown rice with diced organic tomatoes made a great foundation for two organic eggs with sun-dried tomato and shredded low-fat cheese.

I added leftover Mexican green salsa and tomatoes as a sauce for organic brown rice, and plated them with pan-fried Pacific cod from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack.

I have leftover black beans with organic diced tomatoes, left, that would go great with leftover brown rice, and all I need to do to complete the meal is to make a salad from pre-washed Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix, which goes straight from the package to the bowl.