There's Always a Bigger (tuna)Fish Salad
Back in 1999, I'd never seen a single Star Wars movie, but it seemed the entire nation was freaking out over Episode I: The Phantom Menace coming out, so being the good conformist high school sophomore I was, I bought tickets to the opening night showing and went with all my friends (including and especially the dear soul who would six years later marry me) to see what all the fuss was about.
It was a party! People showed up in costume, carrying brightly colored plastic swords (my dad bought me a red one for the event, I'm pretty sure that means he's cool with my Dark Side tendencies?). The high school marching band came into the theatre and performed the Title Crawl and Imperial March live (which was AWESOME). And there was just this ... I don't know, this aura of sheer jubilation suffusing every square inch of breath in the room, a generation of parents who'd raised their children on the orig-trig getting to see a Star Wars movie along with their children on the big screen for the first time. It mattered, in a psychosociological sort of way you don't see every day.
... and then the movie was garbage. GARBAGE. Red-hot soaking wet garbage. It was early on in the flick, when Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jin looks at Ewan McGregor's absolute best attempt to look like a teenaged Obi-Wan and says there's always a bigger fish that I started to wonder if I was sitting through a shit movie. By the end, I was fairly certain that I was, but it wasn't until the lights came up and everyone in the theatre shuffled out, all of that flame and vigor from earlier thoroughly snuffed out, that I realized it wasn't just me. That movie had sucked.
(I saw Episodes II and III on the big screen, as well, and thanks to their lack of quality in the narrative department, I truly believed until I saw Episode VII in theatres and the orig-trig later that night in 2015 that I didn't like Star Wars. Tragic, really.)
Similarly, but on a much smaller scale, I've always thought I didn't particularly like tuna salad. I'll eat it if it's the only option available to me (I don't eat meat other than fish, so catered lunches can be tricky), but it wasn't my favorite. Turns out that, like the prequel trilogy, it was just one ingredient that I didn't like, not the whole franchise, which in this metaphor means that the prequel trilogy is the mayonnaise of the tuna salad world. Replace it with yogurt and throw in some sriracha for spice and you've got a treat!
Enough out of me. Here's the recipe:
Ingredients
1 6-oz can tuna in water, drained
1/2 yellow onion, finely diced
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1/4 cup plain yogurt
1 tsp sriracha (or more if you want it spicier)
Dash salt
Four slices toast (this makes two sandwiches)
Instructions
- Drain the tuna, dice the onion and celery, and put all three into a cereal bowl (or into a travel container if you're taking it in to work for lunch)
- Add the yogurt, sriracha, and salt. Mix it all together.
- Taste it. It probably wants some more sriracha, no?
- Let it sit for at least 15 minutes, if you can. This allows the flavors to bleed out of the veggies and mix in with the other flavors. It's not necessary, but it does make a notable difference.
- Make sandwiches and sit by to accept all the compliments. All of them.
It was a party! People showed up in costume, carrying brightly colored plastic swords (my dad bought me a red one for the event, I'm pretty sure that means he's cool with my Dark Side tendencies?). The high school marching band came into the theatre and performed the Title Crawl and Imperial March live (which was AWESOME). And there was just this ... I don't know, this aura of sheer jubilation suffusing every square inch of breath in the room, a generation of parents who'd raised their children on the orig-trig getting to see a Star Wars movie along with their children on the big screen for the first time. It mattered, in a psychosociological sort of way you don't see every day.
... and then the movie was garbage. GARBAGE. Red-hot soaking wet garbage. It was early on in the flick, when Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jin looks at Ewan McGregor's absolute best attempt to look like a teenaged Obi-Wan and says there's always a bigger fish that I started to wonder if I was sitting through a shit movie. By the end, I was fairly certain that I was, but it wasn't until the lights came up and everyone in the theatre shuffled out, all of that flame and vigor from earlier thoroughly snuffed out, that I realized it wasn't just me. That movie had sucked.
(I saw Episodes II and III on the big screen, as well, and thanks to their lack of quality in the narrative department, I truly believed until I saw Episode VII in theatres and the orig-trig later that night in 2015 that I didn't like Star Wars. Tragic, really.)
Similarly, but on a much smaller scale, I've always thought I didn't particularly like tuna salad. I'll eat it if it's the only option available to me (I don't eat meat other than fish, so catered lunches can be tricky), but it wasn't my favorite. Turns out that, like the prequel trilogy, it was just one ingredient that I didn't like, not the whole franchise, which in this metaphor means that the prequel trilogy is the mayonnaise of the tuna salad world. Replace it with yogurt and throw in some sriracha for spice and you've got a treat!
Enough out of me. Here's the recipe:
There's Always a Bigger (tuna)Fish Salad
Ingredients
1 6-oz can tuna in water, drained
1/2 yellow onion, finely diced
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1/4 cup plain yogurt
1 tsp sriracha (or more if you want it spicier)
Dash salt
Four slices toast (this makes two sandwiches)
Instructions
- Drain the tuna, dice the onion and celery, and put all three into a cereal bowl (or into a travel container if you're taking it in to work for lunch)
- Add the yogurt, sriracha, and salt. Mix it all together.
- Taste it. It probably wants some more sriracha, no?
- Let it sit for at least 15 minutes, if you can. This allows the flavors to bleed out of the veggies and mix in with the other flavors. It's not necessary, but it does make a notable difference.
- Make sandwiches and sit by to accept all the compliments. All of them.
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