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I came home hungry from work one day and was too lazy to make something from scratch. It happens, right? Rather than resulting to take-out, I peeked around in my pantry and freezer for pasta, cheese, and some spinach to make this tasty Alfredo pasta dish in about a half-hour or less.
It's perfectly OK to use a good, jarred alfredo sauce in this. I totally have in the past and did the little trick of adding onions and garlic to make it taste more like homemade, along with a little milk or cream to thin out the sauce (complete with adding it to the jar and giving the whole thing an ol' swish around to get the last of the sauce out.) If you have a little extra time, then alfredo sauce is definitely better to make and still requires just a few simple ingredients: garlic, butter, cream, and parmesan.
Posts published in “Main Courses”
I started eating meat again earlier this year after almost 14 full years of being vegetarian (or 10 years, if you don't want to count the fact that I was technically a pescatarian for the past four.) Swedish meatballs have since become one of my go-to dinners. It is a quick and easy to make dish that is delicious when served over egg noodles with lingonberry jam.
If you don't have some on-hand already, you'll want to buy a jar of lingonberry jam to serve with. Similar to eating cranberries with Thanksgiving turkey and gravy, the jam adds a nice, sweet-tart flavor to compliment the rich sour cream gravy that goes with the meatballs.
Fair warning: Don't try to substitute strawberry or raspberry jam. It won't be the same. If you're worried about having leftover jam sitting in your fridge for all eternity, don't worry -- you'll want to make this dish again (we make it a few times a month, it's that good) and there are plenty of other uses for it, too.
For me, 2015 was a big year of canning. I made countless batches of jams and jellies, fermented pickles, fresh-pack tomatoes in their own juices, a few batches of applesauce, and other things that are happily at-home in my basement pantry.
So, what I guess I just revealed to you is this: If the zombie apocalypse comes and in the event that anything happens to me (i.e., let's hope Darryl rescues me from a zombie hoard and we ride off into the sunset together on his motorcycle), my house is a good location to raid for food.
Anyway...
I give away a lot of my canned goods as gifts to friends and family. One of my favorites that I selfishly held on to was a batch of bourbon and black pepper orange marmalade. I had a craving to do something that involved more than just spreading the marmalade on toasted English muffins with butter—which is amazing, by the way. Chinese food came to mind, so I thought a savory application, orange chicken with some steamed vegetables, would be good to try.
