Possible Ingredients:
- Tuna of choice
- Bean of choice (in the batch pictured, I used navy beans), soaked overnight & rinsed
- Green olives
- Black olives
- Capers
- Sundried tomato
- Sweet pickle relish
- Dried Cranberries
- Mayo, miracle whip, oil & vinegar, or mustard
- etc.
Tuna fish sandwiches have always been my favorite. One of my earliest memories is of my grandma fixing me a plate of tiny triangle-cut tuna sandwiches, each one food colored--one green, one red, one blue. In fact, I can eat straight tuna from a can (or, I could, when I worried less about mercury poisoning), though typically I have a cat to wrangle with, because they have the nerve to think something fishy smelling in a can belongs to them. But, throughout this long love affair with tuna, the tuna salad to me always meant the same simple thing: canned tuna with miracle whip, possibly pickle relish if you want to make it fancy (never ever ever onions).
My eyes were opened about a year ago when I bought a tuna salad plate and crackers from the Square Rabbit, a little take-out and catering place a few blocks from work that I just love. This tuna salad was different; this tuna salad had cannellini beans in it, and olives, and some other things I've forgotten now. So now, in the warm months, I make big batches of tuna salad to freeze in individual servings for lunches, and each batch is new--based partly on what I have in my cabinets, and partly on what I remember using and liking from past batches.
