A tasty and easy tuna salad recipe for lunch or whenever. It is so versatile. You can eat it as a sandwich, put it on a salad or enjoy it with some crackers. Thin Triscuits are my jam with this. It's bright and sunny flavors can't help but make me wish that spring was here.
This really is a simple recipe to throw together quite quickly. Using canned tuna along with some fresh herbs make this not only easy, but delicious. I start by dicing some celery and onions. I love the crunch of the celery in this.
For the lemon, I use a Microplane to get some zest. You don't need a lot of lemon zest and you can skip this if you want. The zest adds just a little more POP to the salad. I have had the same
Microplane for over 10 years. I really should upgrade, but it works so well yet. I like to use this for garlic in other recipes. The fine mince of the garlic gives your dishes that great flavor without having any large chunks. It really melts right into the food. YUM. It works very nice for parmesan and other hard cheeses. You can get practically any color you want these days to match your color scheme. Check it out here.
Next we will get the dill ready. Fresh dill is easily found at most grocers these days. For a couple
of bucks you can pick them up. This package has way more than I will need, so that means we are going to have to use it up in something else for dinner this week. Now I am not trying to be a boujee with this organic dill, but this is really the only thing that Target had. You can use dried dill, but its just not as good as fresh. You can taste and adjust accordingly if using dried dill. Pick the leaves off of the stems. Put it in a nice pile and chop, chop, chop that dill. You will need roughly 1 tablespoon.
After chopping the dill, juice the lemon and set aside. Open the tuna and drain it. I use the "in water" type, just because I don't need the extra calories. But you can really use any type of tuna that you prefer. Once the tuna is drained, add the tuna to a medium sized mixing bowl. Continue to add the onions, celery, lemon juice, lemon zest and dill to the bowl. Add salt and pepper to your taste. Next we will add some mayonnaise. What? Yeah, this does have mayo in it, but we will survive. In total, we will use a little bit over 1/3 of a cup. I am using Hellman's light mayo. Again, just trying to save a couple of calories where I can. I will end up eating those calories later in some form of chocolate.
Now we just mix everything together. Once it has been combine, we do a little taste test and see if it needs a little more salt or pepper or anything else. We want to be able to taste all of the ingredients, so we don't want anything to be overpowering, but we want to add just enough for it's taste to come through.
Like I said early, I like to eat this with the Thin Triscuits. I divide the salad up into small Glad containers so that I can enjoy it all week for lunch. But you can totally make a nice big sandwich with it and some nice lettuce.
Lemon Dill Tuna Salad
Ingredients:
12 oz. Tuna, canned
1 T. Celery, diced
1 T. Onion, diced
1 T. Fresh Dill, chopped
1 T. Lemon Juice
1/8 t. Lemon zest
1/3 C + 1T Hellman's Light Mayonnaise
Kosher Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste
Directions:
1) Open tuna and drain all of the excess water (or oil) from the tuna.
2) Dice onions and celery.
3) Pull the dill leaves from the stem (if you are using fresh) and roughly chop.
4) Using a Microplane, zest a small amount of lemon. Then cut the lemon in half and juice it. TIP: If you have a lot of excess lemon juice, I put it into an ice cube tray and freeze it. Once it's frozen, I put it into a ziploc bag and leave it in the freezer for future use.
5) Add the drained tuna to a medium sized mixing bowl. Add the diced celery and onions, the chopped dill, the lemon zest and lemon juice.
6) Measure mayo or you can always eye ball that depending on how you like it. Add to the mixing bowl.
7) Mix all of the ingredients together and then taste. Add kosher salt and pepper to your taste.
8) Refrigerate the salad or consume right away.
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