Tuna, Chickpeas & Potato Salad

Tuna, Chickpeas & Potato Salad

Tuna salad, potato salad and chickpeas/garbanzo beans individually are among my favourite foods. Here, all three were combined with red and orange rainbow peppers to produce a refreshing salad when it's chilled and served for lunch. The dressing is composed of yogurt, mixed with ranch dressing and the salad is garnished with green onions.

Bachu's Tuna Fish Fried Rice

Bachu is my youngest brother and the youngest sibling in our family.  I was speaking to him over the telephone recently and he was in the process of fixing dinner for his two teenagers. He sent me a picture of this fried rice and described each step while he was making it. Hope I got it right. It's always easier to cook fried rice with day-old rice, so any time we go to a Chinese restaurant, we bring home the rice and freeze it until I'm ready to make a fried rice. I prefer to mix all the sauce ingredients into the rice, breaking up the lumps at the same time. This ensures that each grain of rice is coated with the sauce and means less stirring later which could turn the rice into mush. Notice there is no mention of salt anywhere in this recipe. That's because the tuna fish, soya sauce and fish sauce are salty enough.

Tuna Fish Cakes

Pan-Fried Fish Cakes

Oven-Baked Fish Cakes

These fish cakes can be made from canned tuna fish or any flaked white fish, such as tilapia. They can be formed into patties and pan-fried or baked in the oven at 350°F on a greased baking sheet. In Bengali they are called Maacher Chop and served as an appetizer at the start of the meal, accompanied by tamarind chutney, tomato ketchup or a homemade tomato sauce and a simple Indian salad of chopped onions, tomatoes, green chilies, and cucumber with a lime & salt dressing.

Tuna and Chickpeas Hash

The inspiration for this recipe came from my brother during one of our telephone conversations.  I plan to try his sometime soon, but here is what I came up with. The packaged tuna fish can be replaced with any fish fillets that have been poached and flaked. Generally, a hash is made with potatoes but in an attempt to reduce the carbohydrate content, the chickpeas (garbanzo beans) came in handy. Diced water chestnuts in this hash gives it an interesting crunch.