Reuse!

To prepare for a couple of my future bentos (Recession bento and Pantry Raid!) I present you an impromptu meal. My wife and I are grazers, not having kids yet lets you get away with no preset meals. We tend to cook in bulk and graze on whats in the fridge as we get hungry. Usually, while I'm churning out a bento, I'm also boiling up pasta or tearing apart a roasted chicken so we have some "ingrediants" to quickly put something together.

This week, my wife had some pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce sitting on the counter and I offer to put together a big pasta dish we can munch on for the week. I thought to myself, this isn't a healthy balanced dish I'm about to put together. So, I opened up the fridge and freezer to spy what I could do.

Ah! some vacuum sealed chicken I had frozen. What else do we have? Oh, half a crudite platter i've been chomping on (I had a hankering for some raw vegetables) perfect! What's this? ooh, a chunk of parmesian. Good to go!

So I turned a boring boiled pasta + some premade sauce into a healthy Chicken Pasta Primavera! With food costs going up, it's been gnawing at me that my bentos have been a little bit extravagent lately and I *should* start using my pantry as bento inspirations rather than just dreaming up themes.

Anyhow, just wanted to tide you over until next week.