Jacket Potato Fillings: Tuna & Egg with Salad Cream

Jacket potato fillings are quick and easy to pull together for a lunch or a main meal.  For jacket potato fillings tuna and egg can be a great combo!  Most people would make this with mayonnaise, but I’m a salad cream fan, so I mixed my tuna and boiled eggs with a couple of squirts of salad cream.  Salad cream is a mix of mayonnaise, with a little mustard/vinegar, so, for me, is much tastier than a bland mayo.

Canned tuna prices can be variable, but if you keep an eye out then you can often find the 160 gram cans for about £0.40.  At the time of writing Asda has Princes tuna for sale at £0.40 as their regular price, not a special offer price.   I’ve got about eight cans of tuna in the cupboard right now, so today I decided I should start eating them.

Lunch was therefore decided – it’d be jacket potato with a filling of tuna/egg! 

Ingredients:

• One 160 gram can of tuna
• Two small hard-boiled eggs
• A squirt of salad cream, or mayonnaise.

Method:

1. Open and drain the can of tuna, put the tuna in a bowl
2. Boil and peel two boiled eggs, put those in the bowl with the tuna.
3. Use a small knife (it doesn’t even have to be sharp) to break up the egg and mix it with the tuna until it’s the size you want.  I wanted chunky tuna and chunky egg, but you might prefer it more of a blended mush 🙂
4. Squirt in salad cream, or mayonnaise, to bind by mixing it through until you’re happy with the way it looks.

This mix can be used immediately, or put into a small/lidded pot in the fridge.  It will keep for at least 3-4 days in the fridge.

I had cooked a 250 gram baked potato, from Lidl’s Pick of the Week the other week at a price of 39p/Kg.  So my potato cost me 10p.  I actually steamed it in the microwave (which took 14 minutes), as I couldn’t wait for it to cook in my new mini oven; sometimes I microwave the potato first, then finish the baked potato off in the oven to crisp up on the outside, but most often I don’t see the need for that.

I added a spoon of butter to the top of the potato before adding the filling, then I spooned half of the tuna/egg mix onto my potato.  The other half went into a small plastic pot in the fridge!

Menu Cost 40p:

Tuna 40p, Eggs 7p each (Lidl Simply eggs, box of 15 for £1).  Total cost of the tuna/egg topping was under £0.60 and I used half of it to top one potato, so £0.30 per portion!  The potato cost me 10p, so that is a 40p lunch so qualifies as one of my “50p Dinner” options!

I quite often use this tuna & egg mix as a sandwich filler, or baguette filler.

For those that like to eat healthily ….. this contains tuna (that’s good, right?), eggs give protein, the potato gives carbohydrates …. I’m sure it must count for something “good”.  All I worry about is how quickly I could make it, how tasty it was and how much it cost.  To buy a potato like this in the street would cost £2-3; a frozen jacket potato from the supermarket would cost £1-2.  So, it’s a bargain!  It’s thrifty, it’s frugal.  What’s not to like?

It was bloody tasty too!

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