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Thanks to your link I'll be doing their Pesto Ricotta pasta salad tomorrow!
as a thank you, let me share an old family recipe that may work for you, it is easy to make, quite cheap, has a refrigerated shelf life of a few days and is super yummy: Creamed Eggs on Toast. You can find many variation of this on line, Google it and try one you like. Here is our family's basic recipe:
Ingredients:
Cube of butter
Two cans of condensed milk, (unsweetened, I like Carnation but any brand should do)
flour
12-18 Hard Boiled Eggs
Toasted bread or muffins, (I prefer plain old toasted white bread)
Salt n Pepper to your taste
(add any spice you like to suit your taste too, also check out the various suggestions online for Creamed Eggs on Toast where there are a surprising variety of ways to 'jazz up' this easy dish)
Boil n peel the Eggs first.
Read the rest of this before you actually do it.
Melt the butter on low heat in a large sauté pan that has a lid, (the lid is for later when you put what you don't eat in the refrigerator, this recipe should be good for at least two to three meals if prepared for one person).
When the butter is melted add flour to make a rue. Keep the heat on low and stir in flour with a fork, DO NOT LET FLOUR/BUTTER mixture stick to bottom of pan. (As to how much flour to add: you don't want it clumpy, nor do you want it runny, it took me a while to get it right but if the end product tastes too flour-y for your taste add a bit less next time, too butter-y add a little more flour next time. This whole recipe is meant to suit your tastes and you should have it dialed in by the second time and be improving on it after that!)
As soon as you have incorporated your flour with the melted stick of butter into a rue, start stirring in your first can of Condensed Milk- you can pour the entire can in if you like. Turn the heat up to medium but keep stirring with a fork to keep things from settling and scorching on the bottom of the pan. This 'sauce' will thicken over the next five or so minutes and as it does you need to add that second can of Condensed Milk.
As you stir in the Condensed Milk, take small breaks and slice in an egg or two being sure to crumble up the yolks as much as possible. I have a system where I slice in two eggs, stir, add more Condensed Milk to thin it out, stir some more, slice up two more of the eggs and repeat till all the ingredients are in the pan. As I do this I try to make sure that the egg yolks are as incorporated with the sauce as possible, when I stir I sometimes squish the larger fragments up with my fork on the side of the pan, imo, the yolks create a nice velvety texture to the sauce when blended in.
Now stick some bread in the toaster. I bought a toaster that can give me four standard slices just for this particular meal. Turn the stove off, stir a bit more to ensure nothing has stuck to the bottom of the pan. When the toast pops, stick one slice on the plate, almost cover it with your creamed eggs, stack a second slice on top of this and add more creamed eggs on that. Season with salt n pepper and put the lid on your pot of Creamed Eggs to keep it warm while you go try a very yummy meal. Refrigerate whatever you don't eat. Whenever you wish to recook this, it will be very thick, add just a little milk and slowly mix it while heating it back up on medium-low heat.
For my personal tastes I like to mix the salt in while cooking and I add fresh cracked black pepper to the top of each serving. My sister does her recipe the same way but she adds a little Johnnies Seasoning salt while it is cooking, my brother doesn't do the Seasoning Salt but instead adds a cube of chicken bouillon while it is cooking. The final product should look like this but in my version the yolks are incorporated with the sauce:
Here is a wiki link for more inspiration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creamed_eggs_on_toast, there are tons more links too.
A yummy dish that will feed one for two or three days in a row that costs under 15$. Conversely a yummy cheap dish recipe that can be expanded to feed many people, and a quick n easy emergency meal for the line cook providing crew meals, (My Father could and often did with a little help whip up a large enough batch to serve over a hundred hungry mouths in short order).
My comment on Michelina's and most of the diet dinners is that they're like minimum wage jobs, if you have 2 or 3 you're eating okay.
They only cost a buck, eat two or three.
