Instant food

Tonight's dinner was a complete case of cooking-improv, which is what I do most often at home, when I'm hungry for real food, but tdidn't plan to cook so there's not much ready to cook in the fridge (seeing as how my mother is the Queen of Fridge Minimalists). In the past, I've made such self-explanatory dishes as Onion-Cheese Spaghetti (one colour, weird-sounding, but surprisingly ok-tasting), Potato Spinach 'Omelette', Random Vegetable and Tuna-Mayo Omelette "Crepe" and so on. The food was always made from whatever I could scavenge from the fridge, and while no one is likely to ask me for any recipes, they were tasty (to me) miracles. However, tonight's dinner was pretty unbelieveable, even by my super-improv standards.

Behold: Mushroom-and Cheese Soup Pasta, with Garlic Croutons!

yes, instant Campbell's soup powder (Mushroom and Cheese), a slice of processed cheese, water, and Carrefour brand Croutons, with $2 Daiso special pasta (special in because it's about half the length of usual pasta, making it small-pot-friendly).

I'd planned to make mushroom pasta with real mushrooms, sliced and sauteéd with butter, tossed with pasta and a some of the cooking water, but I had sadly kept my mushrooms too long and they were all wet and sticky. Not a good sign.
So, I made pasta with powdered soup.
Surprisingly, it was actually pretty good.

I "parboiled" the pasta for awhile, about 2 minutes, since the package says it takes 4 mins to cook, then drained away the water until there was about 4 cm or so of water covering the pasta. Then, I added the soup powder, and stirred in one individual sized package of butter (probably unneccesary, but I was afraid the sauce'd taste too much like soup), one slice of cheese, and stirred some more. Cooking the 'sauce' with the pasta this way made the sauce 'seep' into the pasta, flavouring it with a nice, mushroom-soup-y taste.

The finished product looked kinda boring, which is why I added the croutons. This is the only thing I wouldn't do the next time, as it made the sauce waaay too salty. I forgot to factor in the fact that the sauce was really a super-concentrated soup, which was nice in terms of texture, but rather salty. So, whilst the croutons added a nice crunch to the whole dish, they made it way too salty.

Nonetheless, I am quite proud of tonight's dinner, and I forsee many such "pasta nights". It's quite a quick way to make dinner; the longest period of waiting was for the water to boil. The sauce could have used a good dose of rough-ground black pepper to add another taste dimension, but overall, no complaints. And, I made this with absolutely no condiments: no salt, no pepper, nothing but indiviually packaged fridge-staples like butter and cheese, and powdered soup. Is it kind of sick that I'm really proud of that?

Well, this weekend was quite a food-filled one, I made Dark Chocolate-Orange Muffins, Cinnamon Oatmeal Cookies, and I tasted a reallllly good cheesecake/brownie thing, and I discovered the greatest thing to snack on. All in just three days. This was one goood weekend, food/kitchen-wise.

The muffins, sadly, could have been better. Taste-wise they were really good; the orange flavour really strong, and the dark chocolate providing a rich but not too sweet foil to the zestiness. They were, however, a little tough, which I at first thought was because I'd mixed them too much, because I'd doubled the recipe to make enough for all the people my mother had "pre-allocated" them to, but then, when I made another half-batch, being careful to not overmix them, they were still tough. sigh. i don't know why. they taste good if you microwave them, though.

The chocolate bits inside get all nice and melty, and yummy. Or, if you don't have a microwave (or are too lazy to put them on a plate that you will have to wash, and walk down one floor and up again), you can blast them with a hairdryer. It works, really!

So, I guess, overall they weren't a complete failure.


The next thing I did were Cinammon Oatmeal Cookies, whilst waiting for the football match to start. These were a bigger success, although it really didn't seem so at first. The recipe called for coconut and oatmeal, but I didn't want coconutty cookies, so I omitted them, which I didn't think would be an issue. Then, the recipe said to drop rounded teaspoons on the sheet, but they expanded to a huuuge size, then flattened to wafer-thinness. I thought it might be because the lack of coconut might have made the dough too thin, so I added two tablespoons more of flour, and reduced the size of the dough balls to half a teaspoon. They didnt get so big (duh), but they were still quite thin, and they were a tad too sweet yesterday night. but today, they taste really good. buttery and chewy, and fragrant with cinnamon and butter. yumm.


So, those were what I made this weekend. what I ate, though, will be another post, because I just have to move on to my work now. buggers.