Free Meal - How You Can Have One, Too

Tonight we had a free meal for dinner.

Supper, whatever you call it in your neck of the woods. Here in the Deep South we call it dinner. By the way, if it is Sunday, dinner usually means lunch. Confusing? Talk to Frank. When he was first dating me, my family invited him to have dinner with us on one Sunday. He didn't show up. Then at some time later that day, he shows up to eat. Guess what? No food! LOL. We still laugh about that day. Although I was not laughing then!

So, back to my free meal. For Christmas, my wonderful vet cousin gave me some really beautiful pastas. This one was intriguing. So free pasta. Then I had used a jar of Bertolli's sauce on the pizza last night, the Italian Sausage poboy and the calzone the night before. Since it had already gone through three meals, it was free tonight.

Then, being a good Italian girl, I couldn't just have bottled sauce, so I cut up two stalks of celery, a half an onion and some garlic with some already chopped up bell peppers and sauteed them down with about 1/2 lb of left over ground meat. I had one Italian sausage left over from the sausage Poboy day and the pizza day so that went in there as well after I took it out of the casing. We like chunky sauces so the chopping was minimal and quick. All this went on while the pasta took ten minutes to cook.

After the sauce was going, I sliced some of my freshly baked bread, put some nice olive oil on it and popped it into the toaster oven. I cut up a tomato I scored for 79cents a pound and added some buffalo mozzarella I had in the deli drawer. It all came together on the table at exactly the same time. 

Amazing......and essentially free. Our bill would have been at least $30.00 or more had we gone out.