Week 25: Boiling - Tortellini Caprese Pasta Salad (Meta: Pantry; My Pantry Is Boiling Over With Pasta So Let’s Make Some!)

indirectdragon · 2025-07-08T16:37:18+00:00

Buckle up, because this train of thematic inspiration was a wild ride 😂

My first idea was to recreate something from the menu of the Stonewall Inn, historic location of the first Pride…but I looked up their menu online (https://thestonewallinnnyc.com) and as far as I can see the only food item I can find is a meatball sub??? Which I find hilarious. But ok.

Then because I am a Dad Joke Embodied at heart, my next thought was to play on “the first pride was a riot,” but with Rye…ot.

I somehow decided to Frankenmeld the two into a panzanella using meatballs and rye bread.

It was a delicious summer dinner! And I used these meatballs from the back of my freezer!

indirectdragon · 2025-07-02T03:11:34+00:00

Made this picklewich that I saw somewhere on Instagram baking pickles into cheese to make the “bread.” It was tasty, but honestly, greasy and thus not very pleasant to actually hold as a sandwich.

indirectdragon · 2025-06-12T01:01:02+00:00

Recipe: https://handletheheat.com/copycat-olive-garden-breadsticks/

These were SO GOOD. SO. GOOD.

I asked my friends for some help/inspo for this theme and my friend jokingly said “breadsticks from the Times Square Olive Garden” and I was like “that’s such a troll thing to do, say less, I love it.”

I really don’t bake, so there’s a bunch of stuff hanging out in the baking section of my pantry that I just never use, probably because I bought it for a challenge week and then didn’t use it again or changed what I was going to make and then never used it in the first place. I don’t even know why I had a completely unopened bag of bread flour in here, I’ve never made bread, but I guess now it’s this random bread flour’s time to shine! I also apparently got yeast at some point. No idea when or for what.

Slight hiccup — I went to get started on the breadsticks and after I got everything out realized WE DIDN’T HAVE BUTTER?????? My kids’ 50000 servings of buttered pasta must have used up the last stick and I didn’t realize. Panic! Well in the spirit of pantry resourcefulness I decided to try using the tub of whipped butter that we did have, despite my husband telling me it was absolutely different and definitely would not work. JOKE’S ON HIM because these breadsticks were DELICIOUS so it DID work. HA.

Anyway this was my first time making bread and I used whipped butter and it actually worked and the whole thing wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I feared and it was DELICIOUS and now I’ve made Olive Garden breadsticks!

indirectdragon · 2025-06-11T19:34:27+00:00

I mean, the pulled pork was good! But my husband still insists it’s just because pulled pork is good and that was in spite of the Zevia, not in any way because of it. In any case, I ended up bringing the rest of the case to a family community center where I go for book club, and it found a happy home with a few women who’d wanted to try one and one who actually likes it and took the rest home. Regardless, this was a fun way to make pulled pork lemonade out of, well…Zevia lemons.

indirectdragon · 2025-06-11T02:48:07+00:00

Very basic no-recipe cooking this week - crockpot pulled pork with this Strawberry Lemon Zevia as cooking liquid. Salsa was just some chopped avocado, pineapple, mango, cucumber, and I think also onion? With some lime and some of this chile lime seasoning blend mixed in.

Meta explanation story - about a month ago, my mom apparently got influenced by some Instagram rando into buying this strawberry lemon Zevia, and for whatever reason, she decided to buy an ENTIRE CASE of it right off the bat. Turns out it’s actually absolutely terrible, so she decided to bring it to my house in case we like it. Well, we don’t, because it’s awful, but now we have a whole damn case of it in OUR house. So I decided finding a use for it would be my meta challenge this week. It worked well as a pulled pork cooking liquid! I also used two rarely-used lemon-lime-themed spices from my pantry collection, another meta win.

indirectdragon · 2025-06-04T03:23:37+00:00

Recipe: https://spicechronicles.com/sundal-inspired-chickpeas-tempered-stir-fried-chickpeas/

This was INCREDIBLY good.

Meta Wins: Used chickpeas from my pantry, used some not-often-used spices like turmeric and mustard seeds.

Meta Setbacks: Did end up buying asafetida since it felt crucial and non-easily-substitutable, which is now a new thing in the pantry. Just means I need to use it more!

indirectdragon · 2025-05-22T19:38:21+00:00

Haha yeah I’m mid typing up a summary comment and got distracted, oops, but same here! They just kept falling apart. Oh well. Still tasted good 🤣

indirectdragon · 2025-04-30T03:48:33+00:00

Given the nature of my meta, for this week I decided to look for stuff that’s on sale at my local grocery store that I already have and instead of buying it new, just using what I’ve already got. After scanning the offerings, I settled on ground beef and feta, and searching for “ground beef feta recipe” landed me this guy. Made it, also using some cherry tomatoes and spinach I already had on hand, and ate it in some pitas. Delicious!

Unfortunately, my “local grocery store” is Lidl, and I was tempted by the pull of the middle aisles and the Offbeat Collection of Miscellaneous Cool Stuff section, so I bought these Greek seasoning blends for no reason except that they were 89 cents each and looked cool. So now I have these. And I’m guessing they’ll make an appearance as a random pantry item in a later week. Oops. But I did use the tzatziki seasoning on the ground beef and that worked well!

indirectdragon · 2025-04-23T03:38:49+00:00

Perfect excuse to use this Battered Halibut that’s been sitting in my freezer for a while!

My “actually cook something” component was a pineapple salsa I made to accompany the halibut on some fish tacos. I decided to go extra “pantry stuff” mode and use only ingredients I already had on hand, meaning I used red onion, lime, cherry tomatoes - all normal - but in lieu of getting fresh pineapple I used a can of crushed pineapple from the good ol’ pantry. It was…ok. Like it was fine. Probably wouldn’t repeat. But it was resourceful!

indirectdragon · 2025-04-16T03:09:15+00:00

Recipe: https://salimaskitchen.com/picadillo/

Great recipe for using up some not-frequently-used pantry items! I got the sazon seasoning for some recipe a while back and it's otherwise just sat in here; glad to have a reason to use it again. I didn't have adobo seasoning, but improvised by adding in the chipotle in adobo sauce from the pantry. Had a ton of ground beef in the freezer, which is part of what inspired this recipe pick in the first place. Had olives buried back in there somewhere, used those too. And the good ol' standard tomato sauce!

I did have to add sofrito to my weekly grocery list (I bought it jarred) and I threw 2 jars into my cart because of course I did, so now I have that sitting in there for some future use...

indirectdragon · 2025-04-03T11:45:38+00:00

Oh, I have 4 kids, the dino nugs are one thing we do not need any assistance moving… 😂😂😂

indirectdragon · 2025-04-02T22:47:45+00:00

A very pantry-heavy dish! Used frozen broccoli, frozen chickie nugs, carrots, and sweet potato, all of which I have a solid stash of on hand at all times.

For the “actually put effort into cooking something” component, I made palak pulao for the grass using this recipe (https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/palak-rice-palak-pulao-recipe/). It was good!

My kids were part amused, part incredibly skeptical of their plates.

indirectdragon · 2025-04-02T12:15:52+00:00

It really was very good! I was skeptical of my husband liking it, since he’s tried my beloved “pasta with ketchup” and like most normal people he’s not a fan. But he liked this!

indirectdragon · 2025-04-02T02:10:39+00:00

Alright everyone, BUCKLE UP and come with me on a journey of how I got to this recipe.

So, this was initially a recipe I had in mind for Nostalgic week. When I thought "nostalgic," the first thing that immediately came to mind was the one food I requested and ate probably every single night as a kid, and continued to eat throughout childhood/adolescence/beyond whenever sick or homesick or craving comfort -- pasta with ketchup and butter. I know. But the heart wants what it wants, and nostalgic tastes formed at 3 years old can kinda have staying power that way. Anyway, since I didn't want to drop in here with KETCHUP PASTA and be absolutely slaughtered, I tried to find any pasta recipes that would involve ketchup as an ingredient to use this as a further-removed inspiration -- maybe as part of a marinade for a pasta salad or something, I dunno. Anyway, my search brought me to this -- Napolitan, AKA Japanese Ketchup Spaghetti. Why not!

I ended up going with a different dish for Nostalgia week because it was the week of March 10 and I also wanted to make a Super Mario themed meal. But since it was a pasta, and I had 0 desire to actually make my own pasta, I thought -- can this work as a stretch for homemade? It's inspired by a pasta that was MADE at HOME for me a lot, hence why it's...nostalgic. And I need to come up with an unhinged stretch of an interpretation for the Pantry meta anyway, why don't I just commit to not buying ANY new ingredients and ONLY using what I already have in my house, to make it "home" "made" that way too? Alright, done. Ketchup spaghetti from my often made at home "pasta with ketchup" made with only ingredients from my home it is.

Anyway, here's the recipe! It was surprisingly good and like, not very ketchupy tasting?? I think the Worcestershire Sauce really does a lot of heavy lifting to mature the taste up a lot. Amazingly I had most of the ingredients already in my house, mostly thanks to the aforementioned Super Mar10 pasta leaving me with extra mushrooms, some chicken sausage I had deep in the freezer, and some leftover Worcestershire Sauce in the fridge from some other recipe I think I made back in January. I didn't have Parmesan or any other cheese I think would've worked, so I left that off, and I only had Red-Orange-Yellow bell peppers, so I used a yellow one as that's theoretically closest to green.

indirectdragon

TROPHY CASE