Thursday, June 17, 2010

Pasta A Powerhouse In Your Pantry

By Daniel Perez

More and more families today are finding it difficult to put food on the table. It is becoming more and more important to make the food you have go even farther than they did before. This makes it the perfect time to rediscover pasta. Few other foods are able to boast the same level of versatility.

This encompasses what people are really looking for in their food now. It is cheap, it offers many different textures and shapes, and it can be put into many dishes quite easily. It takes very little money to be able to adequately stock your pantry with many different types. If you think it is only good for spaghetti then you have a lot to learn. It can make many different filling meals with few ingredients.

The boxed noodle and sauce mixes that are so popular now and such a waste of money. They really limit what you can do with the product. When you stop and think about what they charge for them you realize that you these are a great way to quickly drain your grocery funds.

Making your own macaroni and cheese is fast, easy, and best of all cheap. Cook the noodles, add a splash of milk, and some grated cheese and you have it. It takes not much out of a standard one pound box, leaving plenty of noodles to still make other creations. If you have noodles, you have casserole and other meal possibilities galore.

The noodles that are lots of different colors actually pack quite a nutritional punch. They derive their colors from the vegetables that they are made from. Examples of these are tomato or spinach. These are wonderful to add to salads, or serve with a light sauce.

Many people are under the impression that you can only use lasagna noodles in lasagna. This is such an erroneous assumption that one wonders where it came from. By breaking them up you can use them in many different dishes, much like macaroni noodles but with a slightly different texture.

Soups and stews can also benefit from pasta. Children are known to fall in love with a good vegetable soup as long as there are some alphabets. What it really comes down to is that pasta is a must have staple for any pantry because of all the different things that you can do with it.

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