Spaghetti con il Tonno (Spaghetti with Tuna) & Chocolate Souffle!

I didn't think I was going to cook after work today, but I did. And I'm glad I did! Tonight's meal was delightful, and VERY easy to cook. The dessert was... well.... I'll get to that later.

But first, I have good news. My sweet mother bought me 8 small ramekins today!!!!!

compared to my larger ones

Woohoo!! When she gave them to me, I detected a smidgen of ulterior motive. The look in her eyes was saying, "Now you can make me chocolate souffle!" :-) This gift brightened up my day. Thanks mom!

Ok back to the tuna spaghetti.

2 cans of tuna (in water)
1 can of fire roasted diced tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp garlic
pasta of your choice (I used rotini)

 It's silly how easy this is. First I sauteed the olive oil and garlic in a large pan. Then I added the tuna and tomatoes (I put the tomatoes in a blender first). Seasoned with some salt and pepper and cooked for 10 minutes. Voila! Pour it over some cooked pasta and it's ready to eat. This took maybe 20 minutes to prepare and cook. Most of that time was spent waiting on the water to boil for the pasta. I added some chopped parsley on top because I had some left over from last night. With a well-stocked pantry, this dish doesn't require a trip to the grocery store. I will classify this dish as 'comfort food.' Warm and tasty. I was humming while eating it, which is usually a sign that I'm happy.

Taste factor: A
Ease of preparation: A++
Modifications: Used tuna in water instead of tuna in oil, but that hardly counts.


Okay, I have a confession. Tonight's dessert was an epic fail. I was thinking about not even posting pictures, but I decided not to let my pride get in the way of showing you how NOT to make chocolate souffle! By the way, this isn't a SS recipe. So I might not even count this as a true failure :-) I found this in one of my mom's french cookbooks.

1/4 cup melted butter
2 tbsp plus 1/2 cup sugar
3 oz unsweetened chocolate
3 egg yolks
5 egg whites


I'm not even going to document all my steps because what I did was obviously wrong. But I'll show my pictures and briefly commentate.

Here's my melted chocolate. So far so good.

This is what it looked like after I whipped in my egg yolks and sugar. It's supposed to be completely smooth, which is the exact opposite of this picture. I knew everything would be wrong after this, but I decided to press on til the end anyway!

This is what it looked like after I whipped in the egg whites and separated it into the ramekins. Again, this is wrong!

This is what it looked like after it baked. Kind of pretty I guess, but not souffle-ish.

This is what it looked like on the inside. More like chocolate cake than souffle.

I decided to make the best of it. I can't eat chocolate cake without ice cream, so I whipped out the Blue Bell!

So basically, I only got the first step right. I successfully melted some chocolate. Everything else went downhill from there. I actually threw out the chocolate mixture and started over, but the same thing happened again. I will retry this recipe later after some heavy duty research!


Taste factor: B-
Ease of preparation: C
Modifications: yes, but unintentionally!