An easy dinner -- Fairly Lazy Pasta

I'm going away for a couple of days from this afternoon (I'll probably still write about what I've been eating) -- all the way to the other side of London. That means that I've been in the happy position of needing to use up the last odds and ends in my fridge. I'm not going to lie, I'd been careful with my ingredients this week so that I'd find myself in this happy position. This dinner is a stalwart favourite.

Fairly Lazy Pasta (offspring of Lazy Pasta, parent of Ugly Fridge Pasta).

Ingredients
Spaghetti
Handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
Baby corn, cut into chunks
Half a tin of sustainably sourced tuna fish in olive or sunflower oil
Cheddar cheese - grated or cubed (I like it cubed for this) - to taste - I eat a small palmful of cubes, but could tolerate far more.
Olive oil
Cayenne pepper
Paprika
Black pepper
Sea salt

Method
Preheat the oven to 180^oC and set a pan of water boiling.
Toss the cherry tomatoes and baby corn pieces in a drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkling of paprika and cayenne pepper, some black pepper and a small pinch of some good quality coarse-grained sea salt*. Bake uncovered in the oven for 20 minutes, or until the tomatoes are shrunken and the baby corns are starting to singe.

After 10 minutes, put the pasta on to boil.

While the pasta is boiling, sort out your half tin of tuna and cube or grate your cheese.

Drain the pasta, allow to steam off for a few moments, then tip in the tuna and toss it through. Plate up. Get the vegetables out of the oven and tip them over, then immediately add the cheese so it melts over the lot.

Allow to sit for a couple of moments so that the cheese melts and so that the tomatoes are no longer primed to explode in your mouth and take the skin off every surface the juice touches. IGNORE ME AT YOUR PERIL!


This is an easy, cheap and scrummy dish. The corn is not essential, in fact I rarely use it, but I had half a pack left over from something else that really was on its last legs. I'll add the variants of this (Lazy Pasta and Ugly Fridge Pasta) soon. All are inspired by rustic Italian (and to some extent, Spanish) cooking, and the habit of chucking the lot into a pan with some olive oil and turning a few flavours into something heartening and enjoyable.

*As you may know, I don't tend to add salt to food, but I do believe that baked cherry tomatoes are vastly improved by its addition - it works fabulously to dry out their skins and create sticky, bitter-sweet and salty caremalised bits at the bottom of the baking pan.