Apron Free Cooking - Easy Cheesy Noodles

Easy Cheesy Noodles

By Noel Lizotte

Some days you just want to eat smooth, cheesy, gooey, warm foods; you know what I mean?!

Tonight sup­per was one of those meals. My hus­band was work­ing out­side, and even though it was fairly warm, I felt a chill in the air.

Maybe the chill was in my mind. But with overnight tem­per­a­tures in the 40s, I’m will­ing to bet it was the air.

I started look­ing in the kitchen cup­boards for some­thing to fix for sup­per and didn’t see any­thing that looked like an obvi­ous meal. So I poked around a lit­tle more, check­ing out the ingre­di­ents to see what I could come up with. Thank good­ness I’ve got a fairly well stocked pantry this week!

Usu­ally, when I do this, my hus­band raises his eye­brows. He’s never sure what com­bi­na­tion I’ll come up with. Tonight though, I knew he’d like it. It’s a sim­ple meal, with noo­dles and cheese and pork. Right up his alley!

Cheese and Bacon Noodles

1 pkg (12 oz) Egg Noodles

1 can (6.5 oz) Mush­room Slices

1 can (28 oz) 3 Cheese Recipe Starter

1 pkg (6 oz) frozen Break­fast Sausages

1 pkg (2.5 oz) Bacon Bits

Pre­pare the noo­dles and break­fast sausages accord­ing to pack­age direc­tions. Drain the noo­dles. Cut the break­fast sausages into half inch sized pieces. Toss the noo­dles in the cheese sauce. Add the drained mush­room slices, sausages and bacon bits. Stir to coat every­thing in the cheese. Serve.

Make it a Meal: Add some peas or other green veg­eta­bles. Serve with a salad. A ham sand­wich on the side would be good, too!

Vari­a­tions: Toss in some chopped red pep­per. Exchange the sausages for mini meat­balls. If you’re feel­ing really glam­orous, sprin­kle some shred­ded cheese and bread crumbs on top the dish and heat it in the oven until the bread crumb top­ping is just browned.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Value: Serv­ings Per Recipe: 6. Amount Per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 403, Total Fat: 16g, Cho­les­terol: 78mg, Sodium: 757mg, Total Carbs: 45g, Pro­tein: 17g.

This tossed together meal was a hit. In fact, there wasn’t even enough left over to save for lunch tomorrow.

Some days have menus that were planned in advance with ingre­di­ents specif­i­cally pur­chased in a timely man­ner. Other days the menu is much more spon­ta­neous. The nice thing about keep­ing a fairly stocked pantry is that spon­ta­neous meals are possible.

Keep­ing a stocked pantry doesn’t require tremen­dous amounts of space or money, just a lit­tle plan­ning. Some good pantry sta­ples include sev­eral types of pasta, some pasta sauce, canned and frozen veg­eta­bles, some sort of meat and a small vari­ety of spices. Of course, you’ll want to have flour, sugar, bak­ing soda, etc for bak­ing needs!

You can use a kitchen cup­board as your pantry if you keep some basic ingre­di­ents on hand. A lit­tle fore­thought and plan­ning is all you need. One day, I’ll have a huge walk in type pantry… I can dream, can’t I?

While I’m dream­ing, I’m going to have the last bit of the cheese and bacon noodles.

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! This recipe is sim­i­lar to ones printed in her cook­book Apron Free Cook­ing which is avail­able on the web­site www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinarychat.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Oct 22 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.