A step up from plain pasta: Peas and tuna pasta

This meal was pretty darn tasty and pretty much composed of random things I had in the cupboard.  And I think all together, this dish cost me around $1 per serving. 

-Can of water-packed tuna (not as healthy as the oil packed but still good) (I probably used about half for one meal)
-Frozen peas
-Mini shell pasta
-Dash of salt and pepper

This was inspired by a Real Simple dish but that one was for a cold pasta dish, and I like my food hot ;]  All I did was cook the pasta, cook the peas in the pasta water, and put tuna into the bowl.  I didn't even have to cook the tuna; I just put the hot pasta and peas on top and mixed it up.

Economical and tasty. Not bad.

+1 to Cooking Skill. Your skill in Cooking has increased to 2.

 I used this recipe for Sauteed Chicken with Sweet Potatoes and Pears from Real Simple, but since I didn't have some of the ingredients and I didn't want to buy them, I left out the 1 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, and 1 tbsp tarragon.

I love the recipes on Real Simple mostly because it says things like [Sauté the chicken until cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes per side].  This helps me a ton because I have no idea how long it is until chicken is "done", and I poke at it every 2 minutes to see if it's still pink inside. 

Also, why was this sweet potato yellow when most are orange inside? Sweet potatoes are deceptively heavy, the one I picked out ended up being about 1.5 pounds!

It was delicious! But just a little advice, don't spend so much time taking pictures and congratulating yourself on making an edible and safe-to-eat meal that your food gets cold. Just saying :)

Now I have leftovers and lunch for the next couple days, yay cooking at home!

And I have leftover chicken breasts from the package I bought, so maybe a savory chicken dish next? The sweet potato and pear were obviously a very sweet combination for the chicken.

Real Simple is Real Awesome.

I came across the Real Simple article about 50 new uses for old things. Which, I love. Their series is always really useful, but when I read too many of them, they all start to sound pretty redundant and sometimes not applicable to my life, but my friend showed me this one and I immediately ran and got a bottle of nail polish. Lucky for me, my house has a couple of polish aficionados, so I didn't have to search too hard (or else I might have gotten distracted along the way).

We have this problem, in our bathroom, with any metal items. Namely, they rust. And if it's a can, it leaves a rust ring on the counter. No biggie, wipe it with some 409. But, we ran out of 409. And now, we have some pretty unattractive rust rings hanging out by the sink, and it just looks bad when we have people over and they need to use the bathroom. Real Simple's solution was to coat the metal bottom with some nail polish. Genius. And so simple. I had been thinking of a way to fix the rust staining, but I couldn't think of anything other than glue some plastic to the bottom, but even then I would have rigged up some sad looking contraption. Plus, nail polish is waterproof so I don't have to worry about replacing a paper towel liner (which I tried for a little while).





I just grabbed the least fancy looking bottle out of our basket and started painting away. I can't believe I didn't think of this/see this sooner.