I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted some days when I get home from work.
I feel like I have been beaten within an inch of my life and I am in no mood to cook. Yes, I am an accounting geek, but it feels like physical labor sometimes.
Being the kind of person I am, I rarely just dial up the nearest pizza place or chinese take-out number and order in. That is sometimes more work than cooking at home when you live in the middle of nowhere. The other big drawback with take-out is the massive amount of calories in just about everything you can force someone else to make you for money. I know I would prefer not to shell out my hard earned coinage for crap that will just pack on pounds. So this my friends, is one of my answers to I need it to taste like restaurant food and be super easy and do not apply directly to the hips.
Not to be confused with diet food, which tends to be something a tad short of satisfying. This has a few calories but nothing near the astronomical number that can be purchased with spit on it. It’s all about moderation.
This a go-to recipe for week nights. I have been known to make it with chicken too…same principle…easy and what is on hand at the moment.
~chicken version~
~shrimp version~
This is a very forgiving recipe. Thank goodness, remember I have been beaten within an inch of my life by the man and the commute and the demands of a husband and child and those unforgiving adding machines and computers and mechanical pencils that relentlessly hold me in shackles…
cheater shrimp alfredo::
1 pkg of Knorr pasta sauce mix (my favorites are the 4 cheese or garlic alfredo) the secret ingredient
1 small pat of butter
1 3/4 c milk
1 box of pasta
an extra handful of chopped fresh parsley (I keep a container in the freezer of pre-chopped parsley from my garden)
1lb of frozen shrimp, thawed (I buy the shelled cocktail shrimp and merely remove the tails) or 1 lb of boneless, skinless chicken sauteed in another small pat of butter
Cook the pasta, and follow the directions on the sauce package so you will end up with 2 dirty pans to throw in the sink for later. Throw the extra parsley into the sauce right before you pull it off the heat. Layer it all on a huge platter and plop it in the middle of the dinner table for the ooh and ahh factor. It takes a whole whopping 20 minutes to throw together and presto you have dinner. It makes about 8 servings and I usually serve it with a salad or other veggies. At my house this means lots of leftovers for lunch during the workweek.
Damn, looking at all this food is making me hungry.
Where did all those leftovers go…
yarnchick 