Most apartments in LA don't come with a refrigerator (you're expected to bring your own!) and mine was no exception. Because of the lack of funds, I was unable to purchase one and so it made eating a bit of a challenge. After all, I couldn't buy anything perishable. To make matters worse, I only had one pot to cook with. While this sounds like the start of a Top Chef challenge, there were no trips to Whole Foods on my horizon, as the closest grocery store to me was Jons. Now, for those of you who've never been to LA or have only visited, you probably think I just put a typo in and meant to write Vons. After all, Vons is a large grocery store chain that many people use. Except that is not where I went; I went to Jons or, as we liked to call it, ghetto Vons. The place makes Food Lion look upscale.
And so began my routine of going to Jons to figure out what I could make while spending the least amount of money. Here's what I came up with: large boxes of dried pasta were, of course, really cheap, so that's where I began. Of course, eating Jons spaghetti plain would have been rather bland so I needed some sort of sauce to go on it. Jars of marinara sauce were an option, but I generally didn't need that much sauce for the amount of pasta I was making, which, without refrigeration, was just the minimum I needed to eat at each meal. I also recognized that I should be eating vegetables. My solution? I would buy a can of Campbell's vegetable soup and use that as my marinara sauce. What? That sounds disgusting, you're thinking, and you'd be right. It was a watery disaster. So, to make things a little more palatable, I would also buy a small can of tomato paste and mix that in with the pasta and soup, thereby making a thicker sauce. And that, my friends, is what I survived on until I finally started working about a month later.
Incidentally, it would be another year before I finally got a fridge.
With that in mind, it's clear I've come a long way since those first apartment pasta dinners, which is what I made last night. Last night's dish began with some onion, garlic, and olive oil in a pot.
After things became translucent and fragrant, I added some tomatoes and basil to make the beginning of my sauce.
That simmered for about 20 minutes or so before I added in some cream:
Meanwhile, I've been baking some spicy turkey sausage, which I'm about to cut up to go into the sauce:
Throw in the turkey sausage, some blanched peas, fresh cheese, and we have a nice sauce to go on our pasta:
At last, we have the final product all pulled together. With this, I had some fruit (apple and orange) and a salad (what I would call my house salad because I make it so much -- lettuce, carrots, celery, broccoli, etc) tossed with a raspberry vinaigrette. And yes, I hadn't quite finished off the wine from the night before, so I stuck with it.
