Perfect Summer Pantry Pasta with red peppers, tuna and olives

Summer can get tricky when there are two working parents in a family.

Many children here leave town for a good part of three months to spend time with grandparents at the sea, in the mountains or in the country, while parents or fathers stay in town to work. Grandparents here are a very popular form of free 24/7 year round babysitting and nobody seems to think much of packing off multiple children to their elderly parents, who take care of them without a complaint for months on end.

Our parents don't do the 24/7 thing, whether for health reasons, distance or simply because hello, they have their own lives + should enjoy their golden years and their grandchildrens' occasional presence + spoil them rotten and leave the dirty task of parenting to the parents already! As much as we would ideally love for the abovementioned to kidnap our kids for weeks on end and free us of the worry of how to organize yet another summer in the city and enjoy multiple dates on week nights, we are realistic and totally believe that it is wrong and should not be.

To be truthful, things have luckily been changing noticeably in the past years, with August no longer being that month where everything is closed in the city (no tumbleweed rolling down the streets anymore!) and more and more women working alongside their spouses. The city and schools offer summer acitivities for children all through August, something quite unheard of until recently. If you ask me, July and August have almost become pleasant, relaxing months to be in Milan, this summer in particular, where the weather has been extraordinarily good and cool. We almost feel priviledged to be here.

There are however a couple of factors to deal with, no matter how well you actually know you are coping. The first one is that atavic, irrational feeling of guilt all parents live with, or at least all working mothers (yeah, sure, it makes us more accomplished women, better moms blablabla but truth be told, most of us don't really have a choice anyway). And then there is the fact that I (as also my husband) was a priviledged child who travelled and spent several months away from home every summer (chaperoned by a balanced mix of grandmothers, nannies and parents).  

As a result, to compensate, we have been away pretty much every weekend this summer, trying to give our kids concentrated shots of the seaside, the mountains and the country. We have been alternating these short trips with some stints away for our oldest with F's family. The little one is still too small and too much work. Luckily he doesn't understand yet and still prefers being with Mommy and Daddy for now.

The result is short weeks, where Thursday has become Packing Evening (I never cease to be surprised at the amount of things you need to take for the under-6 category, even for just 2 days) and Monday has become Unpacking/ Laundry Evening. This means very little time to cook and even less time for foodshopping (thus an empty fridge).

This is where a pasta like this comes in handy. All pantry staples except for some fresh peppers, which you can pick up at any corner supermarket. Not bad, eh? It is very quick and so flavorful it will make your taste buds sing. Go on, make it tonight. Tomorrow is Packing Night again.

Recipe adapted from here, a wonderful source for many tasty recipes.

Ingredients

1 red pepper

200gr tuna in olive oil

3 small shallots

1 cup chopped or small olives (I used black taggiasca olives)

about 4 tbsp concentrated tomato puree, diluted in a little water 

olive oil

(garlic)

(capers)

500gr spaghetti

Slice the shallots and peppers quite thin (and mince the garlic if you want to add some, I didn't) and heat in a pot adding in the diluted tomato puree. Cover and cook until soft on a medium to low flame. In the meantime prepare the other ingredients, chopping the olives if you want to and draining the tuna from its oil. Uncover the pot, add in a dash of olive oil and let cook on a medium flame for a few minutes. Add the tuna and olives (and capers if you are so inclined. I was out of them and am not a huge fan anyway) and cook a little longer. Add some water if too dry. Drain the spaghetti and mix in the sauce.