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Budget cooking: glossy chicken and veggie pasta

 If this is your first visit, check out this post to see why posts like these exist. Otherwise, carry on.

Tonight's dinner only uses 1 pot, 1 mixing spoon, 1 colander, 1small bowl, plus a couple other plates/bowls for holding ingredients along the way. As for the ingredients, I used a quarter carton of veggie broth ($0.40), a quarter box of Barilla Rotini ($0.50), a tablespoon of butter ($0.11), a can of chicken ($2.33), half a can of sweet peas ($0.50), half a can of sweet corn ($0.50), and a couple tablespoons of jarred garlic ($0.22) for a total of $4.56, and it only took a total of about 15 minutes to cook two servings of the whole dinner, so we're looking at $2.28 per serving.

I started off by boiling the pasta in equal parts veggie broth and water. That helps dilute the salt from the broth (which, with the veggie broth, isn't too salty anyway, but still, gotta keep an eye on sodium when we're dealing with canned goods). 

Since watching water boil is a shitty pastime, I used that time to open, drain, and rinse the veggies and chicken (one at a time, not all together) in the colander. Remember: rinsing for a good 30-45 seconds will get rid of a bit of the sodium from the canned goods. Not all of it because of saturation and whatnot, but enough that most folks don't have to worry about it.

Now we're gonna talk about a neat little pasta sauce trick. Most of the time, when you're making a pasta sauce, reserving a little bit of your pasta cooking liquid to mix in helps give you a smooth, glossy sauce because of the starch and Science (i.e. the starch helps lock fat, such as oil or butter, into the water so it emulsifies, aka doesn't separate). Just remember not to burn your fucking hand by splashing boiling liquid onto your hand.

Our sauce tonight starts with a very common and easy base: a tablespoon of butter melted and mixed with the starchy pasta water. This sauce will coat everything you mix into it. It's glorious because butter is the best fucking thing ever and you're welcome. I dumped the pasta into the colander to drain, then started the sauce in the same pot.

Next, I dropped the chicken into the pot to get it started heating up. Canned chicken is already cooked and ready to go, so you don't have to worry about straight up cooking that shit; just want to get it up to a nice temp.

After a minute or so, I dumped in the veggies and garlic and got them all mixed in, and hell, look at that sauce just sticking all over all of it.

Once everything's heated up, just dump your pasta back in, mix it all up, and serve that shit up in a bowl. Look at that shiny sauce on those noodles. Like I said: you're welcome.

This is a tasty, light dinner. Not the most balanced, not the greatest flavor, but still pretty damn good, and doesn't leave you feeling like a tub of lard left out overnight in a cold night. Like most of these budget meals, you've got plenty of options for adding seasoning to match your tastes. Over here, we like to customize shit based on how we're feeling each day. With this one, feel free to throw a tablespoon of vinegar into the sauce before the veggies and/or dump some black pepper in after adding the noodles back in, or do whatever the fuck else you want. I ain't your mama.

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