Dinner this evening is based on, or derived from, a Basque dish, which goes by the name of Marmitako, and is one in which tuna plays a starring role.
The dish (recipes vary, but are broadly similar) features finely chopped onions, minced garlic (eight cloves for me, rather than the three or four suggested by various recipes), green peppers (finely diced, and I also used mild chilli peppers), chopped cherry tomatoes, and chopped potatoes.
These are all (in turn) slowly sautéed in olive oil, to which sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and dulce pimentón (smoked, sweet, paprika), and its hotter cousin, (picante pimentón) are added.
The recipe called for stock and/or white wine; I dissolved around eight to ten anchovy fillets in the olive oil to give a deeper depth of flavour, and used chicken stock cubes.
Once everything has been sautéed and is soft (a lot longer than the lying times given in the various recipes - onions slowly cooked down to caramalised deliciousness do not take five minutes, they take closer to thirty to arrive at this happy state).
Anyway, once the stock was added, the dish was transferred to a casserole and found its way into the oven, where it spent the next hour and a half bubbling quietly away to itself.
Cubed (and seasoned, with sea salt and black pepper) tuna was added around fifteen minutes before I planned to serve it, and fresh parsley (finely diced) was served as a garnish when dinner was (finally) served.
