Katygriff - Giving People who Hate Cooking an Easy Pasta Alternative (and no it's not takeout). (Rice & Pasta Dishes)

Member Name: katygriff

Product:	Rice & Pasta Dishes
Date:	08/12/05 (540 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very Tasty and Surprisingly Easy.

Disadvantages: Again it is Still Cooking no Matter how you Disguise it.

As you know I was a student and as a student you know about foods that take the minimal effort to prepare but taste lovely. When we used to go shopping we bought the cheapest ingredients we could find and then get home and find that we actually had nothing at all to actually make a meal. Well the one thing we always had stocked up in our cupboards was pasta because we all loved it so we have experimented quite a lot and we have come up with two nice tasting things to do with pasta meals.

-----

The Sauce:

My first cheap little recipe is one to do with pasta sauce. This recipe was created when we had all been working really hard at university and I got home with my course friend at about eleven in the evening. We got into the house absolutely starving as we had not eaten anything and as usual we had nothing we could make apart from pasta but we had no pasta sauce. Being the inventive people that we are and in need of some food quickly, we decided to make our own and this is what we found in the cupboard;

* Dried pasta
* Can of chopped tomatoes (this was actually a saver can so it only cost us about 8p)
* A yellow pepper
* Mushrooms
* Can of sweet corn
* Half a garlic clove
* Salt
* Onion

Now how did we make the sauce?

* Start cooking your pasta now if it is dried pasta as the sauce will take about ten to fifteen minutes but dried pasta takes about eighteen.
* Gently heat a saucepan with some butter in the bottom until the butter has just begun to melt.
* Chop up some mushrooms and onion and cook them until the mushrooms look quite dark and soft and the onions have browned which should take about six minutes or so.
* Chop up bits of pepper and add.
* Chop up the garlic clove and add as much as you require (we only added a couple of bits as my friend wasn’t to keen but I have added a lot more since).
* Add all of the tomatoes and the sweet corn into the mixture and top off with a pinch of salt.
* Heat all of this until it is at a reasonable temperature for you and then serve with the pasta.

Yes I know what you are thinking, that this sounds disgusting but honestly it tastes absolutely lovely and quite Mediterranean. We were pleasantly surprised with ourselves and now if I am cooking for quite a large group of my friends like I had to the other week I actually made the sauce this way as it is quite a bit cheaper. My friends said that it was really different and that they all liked it so I was pleased.

When you serve the sauce you will notice that it is very textured due to all of the vegetables that are in there but because of the fact that the chopped tomatoes come in cans with a lot of sauce, you get all of the sauce you would need from them. When you taste it, it surprisingly does not taste just of tomatoes but because you cook all of the ingredients together in the same saucepan then the sauce adopts a strange but alluring smell and taste. When you are eating it you will get filled up pretty quickly as when you just have a pasta sauce it has no substance but with these you are actually eating chunks of cooked vegetables so you feel like you are getting a much more substantial meal.

All in all I think this sauce is cheap to make and great because you can literally just add any ingredients in your cupboard. My mom made this and put caramelised potatoes in there too the other day and it worked really well.

-----

Getting creative:

This was after university now and at home with just me and my sister in the house as my parents had gone away so our first thoughts were ‘oh no we have to cook for ourselves’. We had bought some ingredients to make a lasagne for tea as we had watched one of my sisters friends make one so we thought how hard can it be. Anyway we got the ingredients home and placed them in the kitchen for later. When we came to make the lasagne however we realised one vital ingredient was missing – the minced beef (this was a while ago now when I wasn’t a veggie). It was too late to go and buy any so we decided to experiment with what we did have.

* Lasagne sheets – these are basically sheets of dried pasta
* Grated Cheese
* Bolognese sauce
* Milk

So with these ingredients we thought about what we could do and we did the following;

* We took a few lasagne sheets and laid them out on a plate.
* Get some cheese and place it in the middle.
* Take another sheet and place it over the top.
* Place a thin layer of milk between the pasta sheets around the edges.
* Take a fork and gently press it on the top pasta sheet therefore squeezing the two together.
* Leave it for about two minutes.
* Then get an oven proof dish and place the sauce within it followed by the pasta you have just made.
* Pit on the relevant number in the oven which for us was gas mark 5 and leave for as long as it takes for the pasta sheets to soften which is usually just over twenty minutes.
* Make sure the sauce is spread evenly and a layer is over the pasta.

When we tasted the pasta we were very surprised at how hot the cheese got in the middle and to be honest we found that when you cut into the pasta, all of the cheese would just spill out and create a mess with the sauce so next time we made them we cut the pasta sheets in half to make them smaller and bite size. What you will find when you take it out of the oven is a sauce with pasta lumps in it. Because you have covered the pasta sheets with the sauce you will find that they cook the same as if they were in a lasagne so will have sealed the cheese within.

The taste of this meal is as you would expect with simple Bolognese as to be honest you are not adding any ingredients that you wouldn’t have anyway but it just a bit of a change to how you eat pasta as lets face it pasta is a bit of a one bite meal (that is it tastes exactly the same as the first bite). So this is a bit different and it tastes lovely and I know you can now buy lots of pasta filled with different ingredients in your local supermarket but the beauty of using pasta sheets is that you can fill them with what you want.

These are a few things me and my family have filled them with;

Cheese, onion and pepper.
Cheese and minced beef.
Cheese and ham.
Guacamole and pepper.

Plus there are so many more combinations you can do so if you have any suggestions let me know so I can try them.

-----

So there you go a couple of more recipes to try out that are very easy to do. As you all know I am moving into my own house next year so that is why I am obsessed with recipes and cooking at the moment. I am always on the lookout for different things to do with pasta so if I explore any more I will always let you know.

Any ideas for me will also be welcome.

Thanks for reading.

xxx

Summary: Some More Meals from Someone who is Trying to Learn how to Cook.