Caramelized Onion and Tuna Pasta
It's recipe + video day!
New here? Hi! If you want to get right down to business, scroll down for the video link and allllllll the way to the bottom for the recipe.
Here’s a little bit about why tuna pasta exists.
It’s not just a pantry pasta, it’s a protein-packed pantry pasta.
It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s sweet, it’s salty, it’s robust, and it’s satisfying.
It’s affordable (even if you splurge on the fancy imported tuna).
But what I really want to talk about when I talk about Caramelized Onion and Tuna Pasta is my friend, Ross Twanmoh.
Before Ross was my friend, he was my strength coach. (He’s still my coach, but I’m currently “in between sessions,” for reasons I’ll share with you eventually, but not today.)
Ross and I met at a group fitness class at Equinox seven years ago. Met is a strong word. I took his class, and immediately knew he was special. He had us all doing breath work at the end of high-impact cardio classes. He was teaching joint mobility exercises in the “Ropes and Rowers” workout. He wore soccer shoes when all the other instructors were wearing big dopey bouncy sneakers. I was newly back at the gym after a decade doing yoga and still finding my way, but when I decided to invest in a package of private sessions with a trainer, I knew he was my guy.
So I did what any respectable 40-something year old woman does in this situation: I slid into Ross’s DMs. It’s frankly a miracle he responded, and we still joke about it. It turned out that Ross was leaving Equinox and going out on his own, and I was happy to wait.
Since then, I have followed Ross to six different gyms for my one-on-one sessions. What was supposed to be a 10-pack of sessions turned into a multi-year commitment and one of the best investments in myself that I’ve made as an adult. In our first meeting, Ross wrote down some of my stated goals in a notebook, then coached me through what was a brutally humbling set of exercises that made me wish I had worn something more supportive than a pair of old yoga leggings. At one point, he asked me if I was open to lifting weights with him, and distant memories of Step and Sculpt classes from college flashed through my mind. Sure, I’d lift weights.
He wasn’t talking about 10-pound dumbbells. Ross introduced me to kettle bells, then barbells. He showed me how to do farmer’s carries, then front rack lunges, then squat thrusters. Eventually he put a barbell across my shoulders and showed me how to squat with it. We moved on to single leg deadlifts, then Romanian deadlifts, and then conventional deadlifts. I remember being very excited about picking up 135 pounds. My current P.R. is 210 pounds. He has made me stagger around with an 80-pound sand bag and throw lighter ones over my shoulders. I have never puked after a session, but a lot of times I need to lie down.
There were dumbbell exercises too. Overhead squats and power snatches and walking lunges and plank drag throughs and other horrible things. He showed me how to use the rower machine (properly), the Ski ERG, and the assault bike, which I insisted he rename since no one in their right mind wants to go near anything with “assault” in the title.
I got very used to Ross’s deadpan humor. One time I told him, exasperated, that when I was younger I would work out to see results and now I felt like I worked out to stave off precipitous decay. He paused and replied, “yeah that’s pretty accurate.” !!! Another time I bragged about my new kettlebell callouses. He took one look and said, “hands are for doing things.” When I broke my pinky in December and was looking for sympathy, he said there were plenty of leg exercises in my future. And yet, I continued to pay this man.
I saw Ross every Tuesday morning, originally at 7 A.M. when I had an office to get to afterwards, but also throughout the pandemic, and eventually I switched to a 9 A.M. slot, which somehow I still manage to be five minutes late to. Ross also writes programming for me so I can go to the gym solo, and he has not given up even when I promise him a 4-workout week but complete a 1-workout week.
Somewhere along the way, despite our almost-20-year age gap, we became friends. Turns out Ross loves to eat; his home cook game has shown more progress than my pull-ups, and that’s a fact. Ross and I talk about everything, and it’s not JUST a strategy I employ to distract him so that I can have an extra 30 seconds of recovery before the next round. We talk about parenting and relationships; politics and activism; dogs and tattoos, and he is 100% responsible for the fact that I now have both. We talk about aging and sleeping and therapy and joint mobility, too. When I don’t make it to the gym, Ross texts to check on me. In turn, when I see it’s him FaceTiming, I know it’s the culinary hotline. When we met, I had zero books to my name, and now I have two. He is now a business owner with many more tattoos than when I first met him.
I’m not going to get maudlin about it, but I remember Ross telling me that he could tell a lot about a person by how they handled a fail in the gym. I caught myself wondering what it meant that failing a rep usually made me laugh. That’s a good sign, right? From Ross—with Ross?—I learned that just because you can pick up something heavy today, does not mean you’ll pick that same weight up three days from now. I learned that if you don’t tuck your knees on a box jump, you will wipe out. Sometimes I wipe out. Strength doesn’t mean you’re strong, necessarily. Strength is finding a way to do it even when you don’t want to. It’s being okay with whatever you can pick up on a given day. It’s doing the box jump even though everyone around you can jump higher and half the time you’re so scared to wipe out you can’t make your feet leave the ground.
I’m telling you all of this because this week Ross makes his debut on the channel. Caramelized Onion and Tuna Pasta was developed because I am finally listening to some of his advice about macros. Ross told me that if I can stand there with a straight face and tell people to soak beans the night before, I can get it together and start eating more protein. Touché! I’m listening to the protein part. I’m not listening to any of the stuff about fats. How can I possibly keep track??? One thing at a time, sheesh!
I like to think of this recipe as our first collab, even though he’s going to make his with half the olive oil I call for. That’s fine, considering I often “misread” five sets as four (or three) in the workouts he writes for me. Sometimes I don’t even see a whole exercise he’s put in there, like this week’s incline pushups. What can I say, my pinky still hurts.
Big love to Big Ross!
xoCLM