Cheeseburger Pasta and Ways in Which I Use Stuff Up Before it Spoils

Last night I made Family-Favorite Cheeseburger Pasta from Healthy Cooking Taste of Home magazine. I do not get the magazine, I get the general Taste of Home one but my mom gets the Healthy Cooking and this delicious recipe was pictured on the cover of last month's issue. So I looked it up on tasteofhome.com and printed it out to try a while ago. I finally got around to trying it last night. It was rainy, muggy and generally disgusting here yesterday by the time I got off from work so we decided it was best if we cooked inside.

This recipe is easy. Make the pasta, cook the beef with some onion, add the pasta plus the rest of the ingredients. Boil then simmer for 5 minutes, sprinkle with cheddar cheese and voila! Easy dinner. And it was delicious, it did taste just like a cheeseburger.

Couple of notes on this recipe...the dill pickle relish. I was going to use the sweet pickle but thought better of it. Since we were going to the store anyways, I picked up some dill relish. They only had dill in one brand, in a squirt bottle. This could be due to the fact I was buying ingredients from Wal*Mart, I don't know. Another thing was the steak seasoning. I was planning to use steak sauce but once again, at the store anyways, and I picked up steak seasoning from the spice aisle. I'm not even going to begin to go into how long it took me to decide on which one to buy but I ended up with Mrs. Dash's.

Another thing to point out is that I did not use wheat pasta or no-salt tomatoes. Obviously this makes the recipe less healthy but that is what I got and so that is what I used. As always, unhealthy stuff is always cheaper!

Dinner [Salad, homemade biscuits (from Saturday) and cheeseburger pasta]

This leads me in to the next part of this post, "Ways in Which I Use Stuff Up Before it Spoils". Maybe this will be a new thing for my blog, I don't know. We will see. Anyways, the salad above consists of all the vegetables I had in my veggie drawer that were about to go bad. Some already had and ew. That amount of mold is just not healthy. But this blog is not about my bad refrigerator cleaning skills, it is about cooking! So the salad consisted of bagged salad, (not from my veggie drawer but purchased at the store with the aforementioned Mrs. Dash), broccoli crowns, onion, cherry tomatoes, carrots and cheese cubes (the cheese was not going to spoil but cheese in salad, mmm).

*I also want to add that we used Krafts Mandarin Orange with Sesame Seed dressing. I would link to this but I can't seem to find it anywhere on the internet. I will add that I found it at Wal*Mart Supercenter. It is so good, if you like oranges you'll love this dressing!*

On to dessert. Remember those cookies I spoke about the other day? Well we heated those up and topped with vanilla ice cream. Then to use up the cherries (I only had about a cup) left from making the Clafoutis, I made an easy cherry sauce from my Better Homes and Garden cookbook. The recipe is simple (please note I halved this recipe): Mix together 1/4 cup sugar with 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. Add 1/4 cup of water, stir. Add the cup of cherries and heat till thickened and bubbly. Then heat for 2 minutes more, stirring throughout the heating process. Remove from heat. Then you are supposed to add 1/2 tablespoon of cherry/orange liqueur, cherry brandy or orange juice. Of course I didn't have any of those and I was planning on just leaving that step out altogether but I worried it wouldn't thin out enough otherwise. So I used lemon juice and that seemed to work fine because it was delicious:

Mmm, I wish there was more left for tonight. Its a lot like cherry pie filling. So there you have it, I used up vegetables and the cherries!