Recipe #1: Rich & Cream Cheesy Tortellini

My first recipe for the blog.  Lesson #1: My food photography skills need improvement!

Let me begin this post by pointing out that this was supposed to be entitled, "Rich & Creamy Tortellini."  It's nothing fancy, but it's from the Taste of Home Annual Recipes (2012 Edition) that Santa brought me for Christmas.  Really, it just looked like using simple ingredients like butter, garlic, flour and cream cheese to dress up a normal jar of marinara sauce.  True, I picked the recipe mainly for the simplicity of the ingredients, given its proximity to pay day (only two more days)!  I had everything on hand except the cream cheese and the green onions.

There are tons of really cool recipes in here.  Plus, I like that it has recipes that don't have 23 ingredients, especially during pay week!  Also, it totally doesn't judge you for using canned stuff. Way to be real, Taste of Home.  You know I'm not going to make that marinara from scratch, no matter what Pinterest says.  

Normally, I'm sort of a hectic cook, and I don't get my ingredients all out ahead of time, but since it was my first (real) blog post, I decided to get everything out ahead of time and be really hard core about reading the steps ahead of time.

I minced my garlic, chopped my green onions, melted my butter and thickened my sauce all without incident.  However, this is where everything went awry.  It turns out that I should have actually read the amounts on the ingredient list a little better.  Instead of simply the 4 oz (half package) of cream cheese that the recipe calls for, I put in 8 oz (the entire stinkin' block).  I thought the color looked light, so I tasted it.  It tasted fine....if it was designed to be spread on a sesame seed bagel.

I realized my mistake and tried to correct it by dumping in more marinara sauce and green onions.  That helped a lot, but something still tasted off, so I just dumped in garlic.  That mostly fixed it, but I still wonder what might have been had I done the recipe properly.

Naturally, this sauce is designed to be put on something, namely tortellini.  Instead of buying the fancy refrigerated kind (for $5 a package?  No way!), I used the $0.65 variety from Aldi.  As it turns out, with tortellini, you might get what you pay for.  The sauce, which did turn out okay, was the only good part of the dish, the extra bargain brand Aldi tasted like it was filled with dehydrated spinach powder and sawdust.  Foul.  I probably should have spent the extra $4.  Naturally, I just dumped more sauce on it and ate it anyway.

The tortellini of betrayal.  Not a good Aldi buy!

All in all, it wasn't the triumphant blaze of glory that I had wanted for my first blog post, but it wasn't a complete failure-- I salvaged the sauce after all.

Recipe 1 down.  51 to go.

-Kaitlin