Emergency Mid-Week Meal | Pasta Bake

It’s Friday Guys. Food Waste Friday.

This week Kristen (The Frugal Girl) is officially hosting so head on over to hers at the bottom of this post.

Today’s Friday photo is a rare glimpse of the outside of our fridge.

Inside it’s stocked with food items, as I had to do a grocery shop yesterday (Thursday).

I’m all out of routine this week. My No Waste Tastes Great routine.

By Wednesday evening the fridge was almost entirely bare at Chez Wright.

So bare that it was time to raid the store cupboard and whip up an emergency mid-week meal.

It always amazes me just what can be rustled up when it seems there is nothing to eat in the house.

Emergency meals here tend to be of the ‘pasta bake’ variety and usually include tinned fish of some description.

This week’s was no different:

Step 1: I raided the cupboard and what was left of the refrigerated items.

Step 2: Enough pasta to feed 2 was cooked (the Kids had eaten elsewhere) – approx 125g.

Step 3: The tinned fish was mixed with the chopped pepper and tomato in an oven-proof dish. Finding some frozen sweetcorn in the freezer it was added to bulk out further.

Step 4: The cooked and rinsed (in cold water as the dish was being refrigerated to be baked later) pasta was added to the dish.

Step 5: As there was a little soft cheese remaining in the fridge that was mixed in thoroughly. Now, this could have been anything I had to hand, pasta sauce, cheese sauce, white sauce, tinned tomatoes. It just so happens I had cream cheese to use up!

Step 6: I seasoned the mixture with whatever I had to hand – there are no rules. Then the topping of cornflakes was added. But this could have been breadcrumbs, oats or even crisps.

Step 7: A pasta bake isn’t complete with cheese. Unfortunately all the cheese I had was 1 solitary Babybel. These aren’t great for cooking with at all. But hey it was an emergency.

Step 8: The dish was refrigerated until time to eat. 25 mins in the oven on moderate to high and voila!

A near disaster was diverted! And it tasted pretty good. What’s not to like about a pasta bake?

The beauty of pasta bakes is you can pretty much add any tinned fish with whatever veg and sauce you have, and with a variety of topping – you have a meal.

An emergency meal!

I’m thinking my meal planning wasn’t quite up to scratch this week?

On the plus side there was no waste. No food typically does mean no waste at Chez Wright.

How has your week been? Any waste to declare or any emergency meals to share?

Please do pop in a comment (and link to any blog post) below.

And don’t forget to head on over to today’s official Food Waste Friday hosted by the original founder and inspiration, Kristen.