What’s In Your Refrigerator??? Weekend Dishes Ideas Using Our Great Imagination!

What’s in our refrigerators is one of my favorite on going posts, because I hope it makes us think and use our imagination before we throughaway food!
Having been in several unplesant situations lately, food was the last thing on my mind, but here I am! Today I was hungry!
What did I have in my refrigerator and pantry? Let’s see the ingredients:

Angel hair pasta
Tomatoes from my garden
Basil from my garden
Sharp cheddar cheese In the refrigerator
Flowers clipped from my Halloween display

How to prepare:
Boil the pasta on high after you add salt and oil to the water. Boil it until it’s tender.
If there is still water left, drain it and place the drained pasta in a bowl.
Chopp the tomatoes, basil and grate the cheese and mix well with the pasta. Add salt to your taste!
I think this would be even tastier if some chopped onions are added, but this is a matter of taste.
I don’t know about you, but I think food seems tastier when it looks pretty. For that reason, I decorated my pasta bowl with the mums I had left from Halloween. Of course I did not eat the flowers. As the picture shows, I placed them in a vase. They are still fresh and beautiful and lovely to look at them every morning:)

If you have “leftover ideas” you tried and they were yummy, please share with us!
Using our imagination is a good brain exercise, so it is a win- win situation!
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The Nude Truth is commited to continue to tell the truth and also share ideas from ALL aspects of life.
Our goal is to make everyone’s life easier!
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May God bless you.Have a nice weekend!

Rodica Mihalis, MS counseling and Clinical Psychology

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What’s In Your Refrigerator, Weekend Dish! Angel Hair / Vegetables Dish

Pasta/Vegis Weekend Dish

Earlier in the day, I posted on my Facebook page a question: Could any of my friends suggest a recipe using ingredients they already had at hand. To be more specific, I listed WHAT I either grew in my garden, or in Had in my cupboard.
By dinner time, no one made any suggestions:( I was getting hungry…
Also I remembered it was the Weekend anyway, the time of the week when I post:

“What’s In YOUR Refrigerator Leftover Dish.”
Here it is:

Ingredients:

Angel Hair Pasta. Cook in boiling water to which you added salt and oil.
2 eggs And 1 cup Almond milk ( original) — stir well together.

In a frying pan heat 1/2 cup coconut or olive oil.
Chopped:
1 onion
4-6 baby carrots or one large carrot ( if you have it in your refrigerator)
3-5 medium fresh tomatoes (skinned- please ask for details on how to peel the tomatoes’ skin)
Add any other fresh vegis you have: green beans, zucchini, etc.
Add salt and Pepper.
Sote these chopped vegis in the coconut oil.
Mix well the pasta, the eggs and Almond milk mixture and the soted vegis.
Place the well mixed pasta, vegis and Eggs/Almond milk in a buttered baking dish.

Preheat oven at 350 F degrees and bake for 30 minutes.
Everything is cooked already, so bake as long as you wish according to taste.
Add chopped, fresh basil.
I mix about 1/2 cup in Pasta/ vegis mixture before I bake, and 1/2 cup at the very end.

I consider fresh basil a miracle herb!
There is a Romanian “urban legend,” which claims that if a young woman (preferably a virgin) places under her pillow fresh basil, she will dream her future husband!!!
WOW!!! Wouldn’t that be nice:)
Meanwhile, just in case you don’t dream your Prince Charming, have seconds of the Angel Hair/ Vegis Dish!
It’s either delicious, or I was very hungry… or both!
After you make this dish, if you made any changes to make it yummier, please share with us!
Enjoy, and make enough so that everyone Could have seconds:)

What’s in Your Refrigerator? Our weekly leftovers yummy recipe: Angel Hair

It’s that time of the week when we check our refrigerator to determine what needs to be discarded and what could become the main ingredient in a yummy dish!

This week’s main leftover ingredient is Angel Hair Pasta!
I also have 6 meat balls, 1/2 of cream cheese and there are other ingredients at hand, which are not left overs, but which will enhance our dish!
These ingredients are:
1 cup Sour Cream
1/2 Onion
Fresh dill and basil from the garden
Smoked cedar cheese or cheese you have available.

Preparation:

Chop the onion, dill, basil.
Mix well:
The cream cheese with the sour cream, add the cooked meat balls, cut in quarters.
Add to this mixture the chopped onion, dill and basil.
Mix everything well with the angel hair pasta.
Place mixture in buttered oven-proof dish.
Top with shredded smoked cedar cheese and more dill and basil.
Bake 20 minutes at 350.
Serve hot:) Excellent next day too, re-heated

Substitutes: if you don’t have meat balls, add bacon or any meat. You may also add a beaten egg to the pasta composition.

Weekend Easy Dish

Weekend Easy Dish was started so we could use whatever leftover ingredients we have in our refrigerator and kitchen and turn them into an eatable dish. If I were to brag, I’d say delicious, but I’m modest.

Not all of us have the same left over ingredients in  the same given weekend, and this may or may not be useful to you right now. However, if the dish sounds good  you may buy the ingredients and make the dish, in which case, it will be a fresh, new dish.

What I had in my kitchen this weekend:

Basic ingredients: olive oil, salt, onions, garlic, two boxes of almost empty types of pastas, (about same in size) and grated parmesan cheese.

I garden, so I also had fresh basil leaves, which add extra flavor to any dish, unless it’s a dessert.

In my refrigerator, I had 1/2 a pack of bacon, which had to be used and  fresh green beans, which I kept avoiding to cook on their own, so they were at risk to spoil. If your heart doesn’t pound faster at the thought of eating fresh vegetables, this is a great way to incorporate ANY green vegi into a dish you might like.

Step one: 

Have all your ingredients in the same place and make sure you don’t miss the main one, as I did once, when I made sour cream cake, but I had no sour cream.

Step two:

In a large skillet, cook the bacon until almost crisp, but do not over cook.

In separate pot, cook the pasta 1/2 way. Make sure before you put the pasta in the boiling water, you added salt and little oil to the water, so pasta doesn’t stick together. Drain the pasta and set aside. You might wish to reserve  2 cups of the water in which you cooked the pasta, for use later.

Remove the cooked bacon from the skillet and  the drained pasta and  set both aside.

To recap: You have the cooked bacon and the cooked pasta set aside.

Step three:

Chop an onion and garlic to taste, add  it to the bacon drippings in the  large skillet, add a little salt, if you are not worried about your high blood pressure, and cook  until golden, on medium heat.

Add the green vegetable. Remember? The ones which were fresh in your refrigerator, but in danger to become garbage? Stir them in with all the other ingredients in the skillet, on medium heat. About 5 minutes.

Step four:

Add the cooked pasta  to all the other ingredients in the large skillet and stir well. This is when if the ingredients are too dry, you ADD the reserved water from cooking the pasta.

After I cooked everything on top of the stove,  and mixed them all together in the skillet, I put everything in a baking dish and bake it for about 15-20 minutes. It gives the dish extra flavor. Make sure you use a non-stick product , so the food doesn’t stick to the bottom of your baking dish.

Choices:

What’s nice in life is, God granted us free choices:

You have a choice of what to do with the bacon. My choice, was to chop most of it and stir it with the other ingredients, but I reserved a few NOT crisp slices of bacon, and I placed them on TOP of the dish, so when the dish bakes for the extra 15 minutes, extra flavor is added and the bacon on top becomes crisp.

You also have a choice about the parmesan cheese, or ANY other cheese for that matter:

You may stir it into the dish before you bake it, or stir in some and place some on top, as I did.

If you have fresh basil, chop it, stir some in the dish at the very end, so it maintains the flavor.

Bake at 350 for about 15 minutes, until it looks eatable to you.

Take out of the oven and garnish with more fresh parmesan and basil leaves before you serve.

The good news is that this dish could be eaten the following day, as the flavorful ingredients have a chance to combine with one another. In fact, I liked it better the following day, but this is just a personal taste.

What does this mean, that this dish is yummy the following day?

If you have guests for dinner, you may cook the day before and reheat the day of your party. Now, that is a definite advantage!

Enjoy! That’s how we eat our vegetables:)