Ranch Tuna Nachos

This delicious recipe is sponsored by StarKist.

I remember standing in the concession stand line during high school football season, shivering, jumping up in down, peering around the long line to see if I was getting closer to the counter.

Everyone ordered nachos because they were one of those filling snacks that actually felt like a meal after you were done. When I would finally get to the counter and place my order, I’d watch the concession stand lady lift the ladle of cheese out of the massive cooking pot and drop a downpour of cheese all over my nachos, drowning them.

“Would you like to add beef, chicken, or tuna for a dollar,” one of the concession stand ladies asked me one very cold night.

“Tuna?” I questioned, “On my nachos?”

She went into this very brief story about how one of the workers in the back ate everything with tuna and finally got them all to try his tuna nachos. She referred to it as “the healthy nachos that surprisingly tasted like a tuna melt,” she said. If you’re curious, yes, that was the first night I had “tuna nachos”.

But as I grew older, I realized, like we all do, that we can’t eat cheese as a main ingredient. Substituting for healthier ingredients is suddenly at the top of our priority list.

When I finally learned how to cook, I recreated my own healthy tuna nachos that are fast and involve a lot of vegetable variation for whatever you are craving.

Ingredient Toppings

• 2 Starkist Tuna Creations Pouches, any flavor, but recommend Ranch for this recipe
• 1 hothouse tomato, diced
• 1 jalapeño, thinly sliced
• 1 avocado, diced
• 1 cup fat free cheddar cheese, shredded
• Healthy Chip Options (you choose)
• Zucchini chips, sliced
• Cucumber, sliced
• Tomato, sliced
• Brown rice tortilla, sliced OR Blue corn chips

Directions

1. Turn on the “broiler” oven setting. Move wire rack as close to top of the oven. This will help cook the top of the nachos more evenly.
2. After preparing your chip choice, place chips in a nonstick 9-inch pie dish in a heaping pile.
3. Sprinkle cheese evenly over chip pile.
4. Add tomato, jalapeño, and tuna in this order. Don’t add the avocado yet.
5. Place in oven and cook 15 to 20 minutes, until all the cheese looks evenly melted. You may need to rotate the dish halfway through the cooking time for even cheese melting.
6. Remove from oven, sprinkle avocados over nacho dish.
7. Dive in to your no-guilt healthy nachos!