Tuna Pasta Bake

Sainsbury's recently ran a campaign where they offer plans for five meals that you can feed a family of four with. The second meal plan had for one of the meals a tuna pasta bake, that consisted largely of Basics ingredients. Aside from the ingredients you see above, and aside from the obvious pasta, the bake also contains mushrooms. I decided to give this recipe a little go this time as it involved something that I still have some doubts over - the Basics pasta sauce.

 While preparing the mushrooms for the bake I noticed that the caps of most of them were fully open, gills exposed. I remembered from the article about the white button mushroom and its brethren on Wikipedia that what are commonly marketed as white mushrooms (Sainsbury's included) are young mushrooms that have closed caps. Portobello mushrooms on the other hand are those who have been allowed to fully develop into giant caps of mushroom flavour. Those that go into the tubs of Basics mushrooms then are those that are neither here nor there. If you are not planning to go for presentation though, like slicing mushrooms for pizzas, and don't mind the extra effort to clean the dirt off the mushrooms, they make a good buy.

Most of the recipe can be found in the link above. For this particular one I left out the tomatoes as I didn't want to buy the fresh ones or the canned ones (too expensive, and too much liquid respectively)

The pasta sauce threatened to ruin everything, but ultimately it was the mozzarella and mushrooms which saved the day. I still don't think I can easily recommend the pasta sauce to people yet, until I can find a way to compensate for its sourish flavour. It also does not help that it does not have much actual tomato content, understandable given the relative high price of tomatoes.