Kitchen RO

Sardines with red onion, raw cabbage and walnuts

No cooking, five minutes, one tin and a knife. Friday lunch, for when you haven't cooked yet.

5 min total 5 min hands-on 3.44 in totalno cookingfishquickomega-3
Portions
Quantities and the shopping list are recalculated
1

One portion

1,169
kcal
30
protein g
110
fat g
15
carbs g
Sodium395 mg / 667
Potassium932 mg / 1,567
Phosphorus614 mg / 400
Fibre8 g / 7

Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.

Ingredients

Basics
  • 120 g Sardines · phosphorus
  • 200 g Cabbage
  • 80 g Red onions
  • 0.5 pcs Lemons
  • 5 g Parsley
Fat and seasoning
  • 80 ml Olive oil
  • 30 g Walnuts · phosphorus
  • 0.5 g Black pepper

How it's made

4 steps

Big screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.

  1. Slice the red onion as thinly as you can and put it in a bowl with the juice of the half lemon. Leave it there 3 minutes — the acid takes the harshness out and makes it crisp.
    3 min
    Raw onion quick-pickled in lemon is a different thing from raw onion. Three minutes changes the dish completely.
  2. While the onion sits, shred the cabbage as finely as you can and put it in a bowl. Pour the olive oil over it and rub it with your hand for 30 seconds.
    1 min
    Raw cabbage rubbed with oil and the onion juice softens as though it had been cooked, but stays crisp. Without this step it's just a hard vegetable in a bowl.
  3. Drain half the oil from the tin — the oil in there is good, but not all of it. Sardines over the cabbage, the lemon onion on top, walnuts broken by hand, pepper and parsley.
  4. No salt. The tin already has 360 mg of sodium.

The plan has a hole in it: by Friday lunchtime Tuesday’s food has run out and the cooking session isn’t until the evening. This plugs it without turning anything on.

Why sardines and not tuna. Sardines have four times the omega-3, cost the same, and bring calcium from the small bones you eat with them. Tuna is lean protein and not much else.

The calories come from oil and walnuts, not from bulk. Eighty millilitres of olive oil looks like a lot poured over a salad. It’s over 700 calories and it’s the entire point of the recipe — without it this would be a quarter of a lunch. The cabbage is there for bulk and fibre, not energy.

An honest warning: sardines are high in phosphorus — those same small bones — and so are walnuts. Together, this is the most phosphorus-heavy meal of the week. Once a week is fine; don’t run it two days in a row.

Photo: Cuisine, sardine // Испанская кухня by Lplatebigcheese, licence BY 2.0.