Sequestration Meal #549

 

This was not the original plan, but I changed my mind abruptly; this happens sometimes! So here we have some marinara soup (recipe roughly following the one from The Seasoned Mom) and a cheesy broccoli muffin (recipe from Power Hungry). 

I'm once again trying to get a grip on my grocery spending, not because I'm being extravagant, but because the world is scary and I had expensive car maintenance and repairs in January and February and I'm just like that, I guess? In any case, this was a good meal to have on one of my no-spend weeks. 

The muffins are delicious, if somewhat challenging to describe, and were a great way to use up some broccoli stems. I cut the recipe in half to get six muffins, and they came out really well. I liked that they had a mixture of flour and oats in them.

The soup is very similar to my usual raid-the-fridge kind; I used the end of some tomato sauce and some pasta sauce, onions, carrots, celery, cannellini beans, and orzo as the basis for the soup. (The original recipe did not call for celery, but it was calling to me.) I sprinkled some croutons on top because it seemed like the thing to do. I enjoyed having them, because they added some good texture contrasts.

I kind of wished I could have had a grilled cheese with this, but I was out of bread. The muffins were a great compromise, though. When in doubt, improvise. And reassure yourself that you will live through it all. We can make muffins out of broccoli stems and soup out of leftover pasta sauce. We're wizards.