a hippy chick

You’re looking at the most expensive bowl of pasta you’d never eat on the planet.

Part of my new reality is that I can’t eat much at one setting. (Sitting? Setting? Argh.) Anyway, I can’t eat much at one time, so I’m constantly eating small meals and I refuse to waste my limited stomach capacity on something that doesn’t taste good. Since I have to eat it 52 times before it’s gone.

Part of broke single mama reality is that high priced items aren’t on my menu anymore. Since pill is a vegetarian anyway, there’s no need to waste money on meat…except that I need to get protein in there somewhere between the constant pasta and dessert. I tend to buy cans of chopped chicken because it’s mushy and soft and cheap. You just have to use tons of seasoning to disguise the canny-almost-tuna taste, but I’m up for that. I got some crescent rolls thinking I’d make a beautiful Pampered Chef ring. It’s not only flavorable and delicious, it’s quite impressive. Their ring looks like this:

Mine:

It’s ugly, Problem #1 (not a biggie, I can eat it no matter what it looks like). Problem #2: as usual I just winged it without a recipe and forgot the mayo. Unfortunately when you wing it, sometimes you get disasters and so I’ve been forced to learn how to salvage just about everything–over, and over, and over I’ve learned. Hmm, I really should probably just take 5 minutes and prep…naw. That’s no fun! So it was super dry–which means I can’t swallow it. Well technically I can swallow it, but I can’t make it go down…so it just sits there lodged in my chest for hours. A feeling that induces a large amount of anxiety in me and which I try to avoid. Problem #3 is that I forgot what happens to that beautiful flaky crust once it sits for awhile. It becomes doughy, soggy, and inedible especially to someone who -ehhum!-cannot technically eat bread.

I could’ve just saved myself all the time and expense and looked for a recipe beforehand, but that’s not my style now is it? There’s no way I’m throwing out $10 or so worth of groceries which also happens to be lunch for the next 5 days, so I have to fix it, right? Right. There was a small window of opportunity for me to realize that the hour spent peeling soggy crust from dry filling is better spent reading or cleaning or eating chips with sour cream. But because I am very frugal and so righteous about it, out comes the $1 Lipton noodle package of my choice (I have so many), out come the guts of the crescent fiasco (all that lovely bread…now I want to cry):

In go the guts into the noodle pot. After tasting and adding a whole bunch of stuff to make it taste decent (balsamic? why not), voila! dinner. Only 2 hours and $400 later, I present to you this very interesting dish which I am going to eat until it’s gone if it kills me. Please don’t try this at home.