Today is Nicole’s night to cook,
and we’re having Italian! Here’s
the link to the recipe she found on La Cucina Italiana: Fettuccine with Lemon and Peas. Like most of our meals,
she modified it to fit our needs, mostly in ways that she didn’t anticipate.
When we send out our grocery
shopping team each week, we trust them to make decisions about what to buy and
what not to buy and how to save money. For example, if the store doesn't have an ingredient that we need or it’s too expensive, then the grocery team is
responsible for figuring out what to do instead. And we trust each other to do
that.
That happened a couple of times
with Nicole’s meal. The first time was with her pasta. We wondered how much to
buy. She had mentioned one pound, and that was one box. It didn’t seem like
enough for all of us, but we trusted the list and saved a little money by
buying just one box of pasta.
Then we got to the lemons,
obviously a key ingredient for this recipe. The list requested three, but we
thought that was too expensive considering we already had lemon juice at home.
So we got one instead.
When Nicole went to make her
meal, she too was surprised at how little pasta was in a one-pound box. And she
was surprised to have just one lemon. The lemons were for zesting, not for juicing
as we thought!
So to make the recipe work, she
cooked some potatoes and threw them in with the pasta. Then she juiced the
lemon instead of zesting it.
But apparently juice didn’t do
for the sauce what zest would have done, and it tasted horrible. To rescue the
sauce, she added sugar and salt and a few other spices.
She proceeded with the meal and
served it to us wondering if it would be enough food and if we would like it.
We all dished it up and tried it, not knowing that she had made so many
modifications to her recipe. We all expressed how tasty it was, not just out of
respect for the cook but because it really was yummy! Nicole sighed and giggled
and told us about all that went into the meal and we appreciated it even more.
The cost breakdown:
Bag of frozen peas $1.19
1 lb. box of fettuccine pasta $0.99
Heavy whipping cream $1.99
Potatoes (10 lb. bag, used for
other meals) $3.49
Lemon $0.63
Other ingredients we didn't have to purchase: Salt, butter, pepper
TOTAL: $8.50
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