Sorry for no posts, school blah blah blah. Lots of reading. But obviously, if I’m not doing super fun adventuring out in Tokyo, I’m doing something else.
THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S A “COLLEGE PERSON TRYING TO COOK” STORY but this actually turns out… scarily okay.
So, Sara and I have both found our go-to meal: pasta. We’re too scared to do any Japanese noodles, but spaghetti isn’t that expensive, and if you throw in some cheap meat and cheap veggies (we’ve been favoring eggplant recently due to its low price) with some premade sauce you can get between 2-4 meals out of it. This means less cooking other nights, which our lazy butts obviously prefer.
Anyway, on Wednesday Sara didn’t have class and I only had Japanese, so we went food shopping. Following her around, she picked up some weird powdered soups. Weird, but I’m up for something new so I grabbed Broccoli and Cheese soup. I’ve never had broccoli and cheese soup, but it’s always sounded good since broccoli is one of the least-offensive vegetables to me, and only satanists don’t like cheese.
I buy more pasta, and look through the premade sauces. I still have pasta left over from the last batch of cooking (protip: 500g of spaghetti will fit in our pot, but you have to force it in there and verbally abuse it) but I had no sauce. I couldn’t find any sauce that was just enough for one serving, so I decided I’d just use olive oil and salt. People did that, right?
We’ll get back to that.
So, we buy other stuff, take the train home (and of course still walk the 10 minutes to the apartment from the station, ugh) and we start packing our fridge. Oh, crap, I bought broccoli what, last Friday? Two Fridays ago? Oh awesome, it’s not covered in mold. I should cook this anyway, just so I actually eat it. So I boil it (a bit too long, but oh well).
I heat up my pasta, put on the olive oil and salt, and take a bite. …..Oh. Ew. I forget that our olive oil isn’t extra-virgin, or whatever doesn’t taste like crap when you put it on salad. Gross. Sara suggests frying it, because when in doubt you should either a) fry it or b) add soy sauce. I put it in the pan and fry it a bit… Oh! I have broccoli! I’ll put that in, at least make it look more healthy. So, I put in the broccoli.
And then Sara suggests that I use the instant soup I just bought as sauce.
BRILLIANCE. Okay, I admit that we don’t have a measuring cup that won’t melt when you pour boiling water in so I had to eyeball it, and I did use 2/3 packets, and I did spell the second bowl all over the table and push most of it back into the bowl with a paper towel, BUT it wasn’t very good soup (INSTANT SOUP NOT AMAZING? I AM SHOCKED) and importantly, it made good pasta sauce.
So that’s how a bunch of coincidences and good luck gave me a dinner that doesn’t suck. I got like 3 meals out of it too.
