Recipe Find

I stumbled across this recipe sometime last week. I was immediately amazed by how simple it looked--an alfredo sauce that doesn't require heavy cream! All of the ingredients live in my cabinets all the time.

First, a confession. I survived most of the last two years eating only two meals: pasta with sauce from a jar, and stirfry with Trader Joe's Soyaki sauce. (Although my abilities have since improved, I still maintain that I didn't cook simply because, as a grad student, I didn't have the time to cook. My third staple meal was takeout from No Thai, which could usually provide both dinner and lunch the next day.) Now that I have more time and a grocery store within walking distance, I've realized that I'm actually tired of pasta with sauce from a jar. I've experimented some: once using diced tomatoes, once with butter and garlic, and when the cupboard's nearly bare, with just olive oil and herbs. Unfortunately, the results were sub-par, and my go-to dinner is still store-brand spaghetti sauce.

Now, I am not saying this recipe will cure me of that habit. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to cooking, and I hate coming home after nine hours of work to spend one of my four free hours in the kitchen. But this is a great recipe, and easy, and will definitely make reappearances in my repertoire.

A couple notes, though. First, the recipe makes a TON. I roughly halved it because that was how much cream cheese I had in the fridge, and it still made enough for dinner for me and Colin, lunch the next day for me, and another serving or two leftover in the fridge.  The second note is that, as I said, I roughly halved it. Maybe it's because I worry about the precision of numbers all day at work, but I really appreciate recipes that don't require rigid measurement. I didn't put in nearly half a cup of Parmesan cheese - just sprinkled some, maybe a quarter cup, on top at the end - and added extra cream cheese because I wanted to finish what I had. It was delicious anyway.

That is my kind of cooking!

Then I added thin spaghetti, smoked sausage, and spinach for a really impressive-looking, really delicious-tasting, and really impossible-to-mess-up meal. :)