Dave Warner summer cookbook recipe: Tuna with pasta
Maybe I love this dish because it takes me back to when two pots and a black-and-white TV was enough, and there was nothing that could not fixed by a pint and a shared laugh.
Every day this summer, we’ll publish an exclusive recipe from a favourite Australian author, dishes made with affection for family, friends or someone special.
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1975, Brixton, London. Three young Aussie guys sandwiched between Bob Marley on one side courtesy of Jamaican, Douglas, and 10cc on the other, the favourite of six English nurses who lived in that house.
Cooking for young Australian blokes OS was not very sophisticated back then. Nothing about Australians overseas was. Our budget 10-stop flight Perth to London via the kitchen sink had already shown us that. At stop one, Djakarta, the fellow in front of us had had a slash in the airport toilet, and when the attendant had offered a handtowel and put out his palm for a tiny gratuity the Aussie, misunderstanding said, “Thanks mate”, and shook his hand.
Our kitchen had a gas cooker with three burners. If there was an oven, we never used it. We weren’t completely cooking-illiterate, having mastered omelettes, spag bol and anything with bacon. Our culinary parameters were defined by our available hardware: a frypan and two pots.
However, fresh from the inspiration of the Louvre, Prado and Colosseum, we were not standing still. There were no John Newcombe moustaches, tight shorts for us — we were not beer-swilling Earl’s Court boors, we were world citizens now.
Drawing on months of European exploration, that introduced me to such wonders as pastis and pistachio, it was here I developed the 10-minute, two-pot (one pot at a pinch) recipe that has nourished me since. The only dish all three of my children ate with gusto when little: tuna with pasta.
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Summer Cookbook
Australia’s favourite authors share their most meaningful recipes.
I still enjoy it. Maybe it reminds me of music that changed my life. Perhaps it’s because it’s quick, tasty with not much to clean up. Maybe I love it because it takes me back to when two pots and a black-and-white TV was enough, a world pre-computers and algorithms, when our futures stretched out like young Aussies returning home across three vacant seats of a Qantas jumbo, so much blue-sky still ahead and nothing behind that could not fixed by a pint and a shared laugh.
Sadly, I can’t be 20 again, and my treasured cassette of the Wailers live has long gone. Its replacement CD, though outmoded, is however within arm’s reach, a beer awaits, and the pantry is always stocked with tuna and pasta. The grooves may be dwindling but the arm hasn’t lifted off the LP just yet.
One egg per person
Half-a-colander of pasta
A tin of tuna
Olives (plenty)
Parmesan
Pepper
1. Boil two pots of water. Pop in the eggs in one and the half-a-colander of pasta (or however much you need) in the other. My preference is tube or shell pasta, 5-10 mins on boil.
2. Drain the pasta, bring out your hardboiled egg(s), shell and cut it up.
3. Put the pasta in a bowl with the egg, add a tin of tuna and a bunch of olives (black is my preference but green works okay).
4. Add parmesan and pepper.
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Bob Dylan declared Dave Warner one of his favourite Australian artists. In Perth in 1973 Warner formed Australia’s first punk band, Pus. After travelling to London in 1975 where he developed a total concept of original Australian music, he called `suburban rock’, Warner returned to Perth in 1976 and formed Dave Warner’s from the Suburbs. While continuing to record, Warner turned his creative mind to other forms of writing beginning with stage shows and musicals. In the 1995 he published his first novel City Of Light which won the WA Premier’s Award for Literature. That is the first of Warner’s 11 crime novels. He is a winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Australian Crime Fiction, and has written children’s books, and non-fiction books. He has also written screenplays for film and television.
After The Flood by Dave Warner, Fremantle Press