Saturday, July 11, 2009

Making Dinner Your Own

Thursday night I made Spaghetti with Italian Sausage and Stuffed Clams...
sounds sorta fancy, was delicious, looked amazing... Did I do anything from scratch? NO!!!
At around 1pm, I took Rhodes Texas Rolls out of the freezer, sprayed a muffin pan, and threw the rolls in the pan, covered it with a dish towel and set aside.  I also opened a jar of Ragu, put that in a pan with a couple cloves of garlic, a couple tablespoons of fennel seed, and some italian seasoning. Put that on low, stirred and walked away.
That took less than 10 min of my time, and in about an hour the whole place smelled like I was cooking the sauce from scratch!
Know what I did next?!

Played with Keira until Mike got home - he came home early because we were expecting a very important guest - a great friend of his back from Iraq.

"30 Minute Meals Style" I finished cooking dinner.

I preheated the oven to 450. Filled a pot of water and put it on high to get it boiling. Stirred the sauce. And then I started to clean some Iceberg lettuce and a tomato for a salad.  When the oven was preheated, I took the stuffed clams out of the freezer, place them on a sheet pan and in they went.  I took out my fake italian sausage (it was really italian style hot and spicy smoked sausage). I grilled them up on a grill pan. took 3 of them and cut them up into piece and through them in the sauce. The others went on the platter, then I finished up the salad, and then dropped the heat in the oven to 350 about 15min into cooking.  5 minutes later I put the rolls in the oven. I salted the boiling water and added the pasta. I finished setting the table, and made my garlic butter - 2 tablespoons of butter melted in the microwave, and a few shakes of garlic powder.  After 10 minutes, I drained the spaghetti, reserved a ladle of the starchy water and added it to my sauce, and put the spaghetti back in the pan.  I took out the rolls, and brushed them with the garlic butter, and put them back in the oven. I stirred the sauce one last time and added some to the pasta to get it coated. I then took out the clams and rolls.  Put the rolls in a bowl with a dish towel to keep them warm.  Added all the spaghetti to my platter, and put a couple stuffed clams on the platter as well.
It was good - as good as opening a whole bunch of packages could be in my opinion. It looked good - It looked like I went through a lot of work when in reality I was in the kitchen for less than 45 minutes TOTAL.
It made a ton of food. So of course I put it in individual containers so Mike could take it to work for lunch.
No I would not ordinarily post something like this because there is no recipe, but this is the sole reason right here:
He brought it for lunch and a co-worker asked him "Wow, where'd you go for dinner last night?"
REALLY??? My out of the box fake meal looked like it came from a restaurant!?!
I am feeling proud and thought I'd share :)




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