Filed under cheap, easy and bland
Preparing meals; something you have to do for most of your life, unless you qualify as “rich and famous”. Today, left to forage for my lunch, I decided to raid the pantry.
Now, something that we take as a given, here in Canada, is a prepared pasta product marketed as “K-D”. A staple food, for the average college student. Low cost, nutritious (in a manner of speaking). The addition of dairy to dairy, I guess. Milk, butter, some powdered cheese derivative all congeal into a yummy sauce, that you use to coat some low-grade noodles. Today, mine were in the form of tiny seashells. What brought me to this choice? Well, the expiry date, mainly. Off the calendar, last month. Doesn’t scare me, because the storage time is long. So long that I don’t even remember when my little carton of materials was actually purchased. Or where. Or why.
To reassure you, being lightly out of date changed nothing. This is a meal that is essentially bland. And simple, to prepare. In fact, over a lifetime, I can remember those moments when people bent the rules printed on the carton. I had one cousin that timed the cooking: if it said seven minutes, then it got seven minutes. Another relative (a rookie in the K-D methodology) decided to add the noodles AND the ubiquitous cheese powder to the water, before boiling. That didn’t work well.
I could have gone in so many other directions, but today I wanted cheesy pasta. And that’s what I got. Will I race out to replenish inventory? Let me think about that, for a while.
