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?