Creamy Garlic Tuna Pasta

"I'm in a restaurant eating a creamy pasta that I can't see but I can taste garlic and tuna."

All of a sudden, nagising na ako. To my dismay, nananaginip lang pala ako. And suddenly, I am craving for a tuna pasta. The next thing I knew, I was already in the kitchen: boiling water in a big pot and preparing the pan for the pasta sauce.

Here are the ingredients that I found in my cupboard:

• approximately 300 grams of fusilli pasta

• can of tuna

• butter

• olive oil

• minced garlic

• shredded cheddar cheese

• ground black pepper

In the pot, I cooked the pasta until al dente. For the sauce, I melted the butter in a few tablespoons of olive oil, just to make sure na hindi masusunog ang olive oil. Once I noticed na melted na ang butter, I added the minced garlic. If you're into garlic, add to your heart content.

While waiting for an almost light brown garlic, I drained the oil of the tuna. Noong na-achieve na ang gusto kong kulay ng garlic, I added the tuna and continued stirring the sauce until the tuna turned brown. Hininaan ko ang apoy, just enough for my sauce to be heated until pwede nang ilagay ang pasta sa sauce.

I scooped a cup of pasta water before draining the rest and immediately added the pasta to the sauce and turned off the heat right away. I added pasta water to the mixture that I thought was enough to taste saltiness in the pasta. For an added flavor, I put some ground black pepper and a lot of shredded cheddar cheese.

Right away, I plated my pasta and enjoyed it with yellow mango smoothie while watching the new episodes of The Peacemaker on HBOgo.

My History of Loving Tea

"For someone like me who is living alone, stress and anxiety can come and go any time of the day. So, coping with them is something that I take seriously."

Some of my friends when they first met me asked how I was able to keep up with life while living alone. And my answer has always been as simple as "I find ways to keep myself grounded". Since my first job, I learned how to cope with stress and anxiety in a way that my body and mind can easily reconnect to my reality. One of my coping mechanisms is having tea while reading, writing, or doing nothing at all.

I started to have tea in my day-to-day life when a friend, from the university organization that I was once a member of and I talked about our morning and night routines. She told me that whenever she had difficulty falling asleep at night, she would drink at least a cup of hot Chamomile tea.

Also, that time was the start of the milk tea craze in my area, and my best friends and I used to hang out in different milk tea shops near our university. We even came to a point where we were researching different teas that could taste great together. We also had milk teas that represented the three of us. There were also instances, maybe three days before exams, when we would stay in one of our two favorite shops for at least two hours to compare and review our notes.

Before, I used to buy boxes of tea packed in individual bags but when I realized that those bags were just another waste in my bin, I decided to buy loose leaf packed in reusable tin and glass containers. I have a couple of online sellers from whom I buy my supplies. They have very good customer service and their teas are just as good as what I expect them to be. They even give me samples of the other teas that they sell. But for now, I'm enjoying Chamomile, Jasmine, Hibiscus, and Assam.

Whenever my friends go out of the country and ask me for something that I want, aside from the go-to "I LOVE" shirt and ref magnets, tea is always my answer. And yes, whenever I give gifts, most of the time, it has something to do with tea, either the tea itself or some tea wares.

The next things on my list that I want to do in my tea adventure are to develop food recipes that involve tea and to grow my tea. So watch out for that in this post and my coming posts.