Dinner Bowl #42

 

Here we have a delightful bowl of curry peanut vermicelli soup! It's both pretty and satisfying. I love a bowl of noodles.

I have been to the store now, so this particular "pantry challenge" cycle is over, but I have a totally different approach. I am in a new mode. It is not a low spend cycle, nor an avoid-the-store pantry challenge, so much as it's a pantry-utilization season. Maybe it's more of what they call a "low buy year," something I keep being served on my personal algorithms. Anyway: I had the vermicelli, so I needed to do something with that, but something that would not add new things to the pantry stash. My half-used bag of rice vermicelli needed using and this sounded like a delicious, hearty winter soup to have.

I'm not telling myself I won't buy vermicelli again if I really want to have it (though I still have some left, so this isn't an immediate concern), but I am also not going to buy it unless I really have a craving, and if I do, I will have to have a plan to use it all. These are the current rules for non-staple foods. 

We'll see how it goes. In any case, I misread things as I was going along because I was cutting it in half and ended up adding more noodles than I meant to, but that was okay in this case, and I really loved every bite. I did add some sriracha because I felt it needed it, and also I didn't add mint because I forgot to buy it, so that may be why I needed to add something, so I won't count that against the recipe. It used things I either already had or would always have on hand (I will always have peanut butter, for example), so it didn't create a need for me to store anything.

There are so many fun adventures to have using what I have, and I hope all of them are as enjoyable as this one!