Easy Recipe: Tuna Farfale Pomodoro

The Italian can argue with you for hours on what really constitute a Pomodoro sauce. But let’s pretend that thicker and smoother simple tomato sauce, compare to marinara sauce, can be passed as Pomodoro sauce. This recipe is great for those who want to start to encourage your kids to eat on their own. The farfale, or butterfly shaped pasta can easily grab the thick sauce and other ingredients. Therefore, all your kid need is their fork and direction. You only need to teach them how to aim the fork in two directions – to their pasta and mouth.

Farfale works great with thick sauce but still runny and smaller size ingredients. This is why in this recipe I chopped the vegetables finely. This is one of those recipe where you can substitute some of the ingredients with processed food. If you’re in a hurry to prepare a meal for your kid, substitute softer type of fish such as dory or cod with canned chunk tuna in water.

The pomodoro sauce can be prepared in advance and stored away.

Pomodoro sauce

Ingredients

• Fresh Tomatoes
• Fresh Red Tomatoes
• Olive Oil
• Garlic
• Fresh Basil

Diced the red tomatoes and peel and crushed the garlic. For the basil since I want to hide all the green ingredients i would finely chopped it, since children have the tendency of running away from all thing green on their food.

Drizzle your pot with olive oil and cook the garlic until fragrant but not brown. Throw in the diced tomatoes, I would just leave them wet from washing them beforehand. You can either use only tomatoes, or mix it with canned tomatoes or tomato paste. Shimmer for around 20 – 30 minutes until the tomatoes soften and watery and you can put in the basil leaves and wait for another 2 minutes.

Remove garlic from the sauce because we don’t want our precious kid to accidentally eat the garlic. People usually chopped their garlic, but I sometime found that strong garlic taste can be a little bit of turn off for kids.

The pomodoro sauce can also be substitute with ready made simple tomato sauce.

Now onto the real cooking.

Tuna Farfale Pomodoro

Ingredients

• A half handful of Spinach, Kangkung or any other green leaf vegetables
• Fresh Basil, only if you used ready made tomato sauce
• 2 spoonful of cooked Cod or Dory fish, boil until cooked and flake afterward. This can be substitute with canned chunk tuna in water
• White pepper (for older kid)
• Parmesan powder for garnish

1 serving of Barila Farfale (my fave brand for farfale) cooked al dente (around 12 minutes). To cook pasta, you don’t need any oil. Just use a lot of water to make sure that the pasta won’t stick together and occasionally stir the pot.

How To:

• Finely chopped the basil and vegetable leaves. Set aside.
• Drizzle your pan with half spoon of olive oil and put in the chunk tuna, fry until it’s a  little bit dry but not too brown. Pour the tomato sauce in until it’s slightly thicken and reduce by a third. Put in the basil vegetable leaves into the tomato sauce and stir for another 2 minutes or until the vegetables cooked.
• To complete the dish, pour the pre-cooked farfale into the sauce until the farfale is all covered in your pomodoro sauce.

Serve the pasta in a bowl when it’s lukewarm. Garnish with Parmesan powder.