Pantry Raid!

It's an old-fashioned pantry raid!  We'll be storming the freezer and the pantry to use up all of the stupid things I bought on sale cause they were a good deal but still have yet to be used.  A few months expired?  Don't care!  Doesn't sound good anymore?  Too bad!  It's food.  Get over it.

"This week on Iron Chef, our Chefs' secret ingredient is...crap."

So there's a super easy recipe on the back of a Rice-a-Roni box.  It's basically like this:  Take this product and add chicken and a vegetable.  Cook.  Mix together.  Eat.  See?  Easy.

I think you can apply this one-bowl meal recipe principle to any easy-cook boxed starches.  Tonight, for example, I took 2 of my 4 boxes of Stove Top stuffing I had stocked up on when it was 89 cents post-Thanksgiving and did essentially the same thing.

The box itself offers three tasty looking recipe ideas, except they all include some kind of cheese or creamed soup or sour cream.  I can't eat dairy so they were all useless to me.

Noticing on the box of Rice-a-Roni that the only difference in the amount of water you add to the side dish alone versus the easy meal idea is a quarter cup less of water.  It's less for the meal - this makes sense; there's water content in the chicken and the veg, so to displace and ensure your rice isn't all soupy, use less water.  Got it.

So apply this same principle to the stuffing mix and done!  Cook the chicken in the boiling water, toss in some frozen broccoli or green beans, let simmer for just a couple minutes and then add in the stuffing packets and watch it expand.  Let sit, then fluff.  Just like Thanksgiving.  

And it's just hit me - I think I have a can of cranberry sauce in my fridge...confirmed!  Wow!  It's good til July 25th 2013 (obviously, it's been there for years)!  You want to know what serendipitous means?  There it is.  Tomorrow, there will be sliced jelly with the left-overs.  Left-overs!  There it is again!  It really is Thanksgiving in July!