Yes, I Still Call It “Bowtie Pasta”

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Hi everyone! I’m so excited to start cooking with all of you! I decided to start off with my favorite meal. This is a dish that I would ask my mom to cook for dinner at least once a week as a kid. The official name of this dish is “Farfalle with Summer Sauce”, but I simply called it “Bowtie Pasta”– a name which I still refer to it as to this day.bowtie.png

This dish consists of pasta in a light sauce with tomatoes, peas, and cheese. Despite my recently discovered intolerance to lactose, I will ALWAYS cheat on my dairy-free lifestyle for the additional cheese in this dish. While this meal is my favorite, it is also one of the easier recipes that I have planned for these $10 meal challenges (it’s so easy my dad can cook it).

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Farfalle with Summer Sauce

  • 1 lb of Farfalle pasta
  • ⅓ cup of olive oil
  • ⅓ cup of lemon juice
  • 14 oz of diced tomatoes
  • 1 tbsp of dried basil
  • 1 tsp of granulated garlic
  • 1 tsp of salt
  • ½ tsp of pepper
  • 1 cup of frozen peas
  • 1 cup of shredded mozzarella cheese
  1. Boil water and cook pasta
  2. While pasta is cooking, mix together oil, lemon juice, tomatoes, basil, garlic, salt and pepper in a bowl. Set aside.
  3. Drain pasta and pour back into pot or large bowl.
  4. Add in peas and cheese.
  5. Mix sauce in.

Shopping

As I stated in my mission statement, my goal is to recreate these recipes for $10-$15, but am aiming more towards the $10 range. I know that this budget will definitely pose some issues in the future, however this meal was fairly stress-free to recreate for under $10! Spices aside, I spent just over $9 on this recipe that ended up feeding four people, which is quite the broke college kid bargain if you ask me! The only “sacrifice” I had to make was the canned tomatoes, and the fact that they also weren’t a nice brand of canned tomatoes, but it didn’t affect the taste much so overall it was a minor sacrifice. Here are the specific ingredients and prices from my trip to ShopRite.

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**As a side note: I know that I didn’t include the spices or olive oil in my costing out of this meal. I already had the spices in my kitchen, but also I feel as though the amount of spice I use would barely impact the total cost**

Cooking

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As for cooking, I followed the cooking instructions in the recipe pretty strictly, and everything came out great! I am glad that the prep is minimal for this dish being that I have basically no counter space in my apartment. I never realized how important counter space is and I miss my mom’s large kitchen possibly even more than her cooking. Cooking this meal is so bittersweet for sure. It’s sweet because I get to eat one of my favorite meals and reminisce about all of the times I would literally piss my mom off about making me this until she finally gave in, or all of the busy nights where my mom would whip this up quickly enough that she could ensure that we all sat down and ate together. Family dinners were of utmost importance to my mom during my childhood and even now she’ll make me drive home once in a while just so we can all eat together. However, it’s bitter for me now because being able to cook this means that I’m old now 😦 Well at least I got this wonderfully-cliche boomerang of the last two steps of the recipe 🙂

Final Product!

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Final Thoughts and Possible Improvements

I feel as though this meal came out very well! It was able to feed myself and all three of my housemates for dinner which is definitely a win for a $10 meal. The four of us rated it a 10/10 for recreate-ability and affordability (and taste)! However, if I had to compare it to my mom’s version, I’d say that however she puts the cheese in so it melts a bit more is much better than how it turned out in my replication. All in all, I’m very pleased with my first challenge!

See you guys next week!

— Kelsey

Mission Statement

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We all get homesick. For me, I get most homesick when I’m hungry, being that my mom’s cooking is easily the greatest thing since sliced bread. Until this year I didn’t understand the term “starving college kid”, but living without a meal plan is hard. I never thought I’d miss Brower, but I am so bored tired of pizza rolls and pasta with butter (something I thought could never happen💔).

pizza rolls

For this reason, I decided to challenge myself to recreate my mom’s cooking for myself and my roommate. I have asked each of my family members to choose their two favorite meals and I will replicate one each week in attempt to: a) eat substantial meals and b) cure that homesickness a little bit. I asked my family for their favorite meals so I can maximize the homesickness cure, and to ensure I’m replicating the best of the best. The challenge of this arises in that I get $50 a week to buy food, so I will have to buy ingredients for this meal totally under $10-$15!

While this challenge will help me, I hope that the recipes and money saving ideas can help readers as well! At the end of each meal I will have my roommate, or other guest, to rate the meal to give an idea of how realistic it is to recreate this meal for a non-culinary trained person ,and also for the price range. I’m excited for this and I hope you all check back next week!

-Kelsey