Art of Laze analysis:
If you seek to live cheaper, quicker, easier, with lower standards, then you must be willing to use some ingredients that most people would not imagine. I started this concoction with a tempting bag of cheap star pasta and a few fresh vegetables already chopped up from recent attempts at stir-frying. But it needed some kind of stock to give it flavor, maybe something that actually contained real processed bits of meat from an animal who had really lived at one time. Something that would not require skinning, dicing, and cooking separately for a long time.
Bullion cubes (which are apparently spelled "bouillon cubes" in some circles) might have added a little flavor, but not enough by themselves. The contents of my freezer included one nearly empty box of Neapolitan ice cream, a box of chocolate ice cream from last season, some ground turkey, a piece of frozen jack-o-lantern from 1999(?), a few pounds of rhubarb (their day will come), and some Meijer pot pies on sale 3 for $1.
I had been playing with these cheap pot pies a lot lately. Too lazy to cook them in the oven, I had been peeling off the pie tins and guessing how to cook them in the microwave. Since they're frozen solid and all the insides are liquidy, you can nuke it for ten minutes on 30% and it's still frozen in the middle. If you read your microwave's owner's manual sometime, you'll notice that bowls of water or foods with a lot of moisture absorb the rays (or whatever that magic shit is that causes things to cook in a microwave). But water also blocks the rays or waves from passing through. That's why things are usually cooked outside, but not inside.
Knowing all together too much about the microwave, I knew that the best way to fully thaw that frozen lump left in the center of the pot pie was to stir it. So I peeled back the top crust, stirred it, thereby redistributing the frozen parts to the outside where they would not be blocked from the waves, nuked it for a minute on high, and voila.
Unfortunately the pie crust is not pre-cooked. It's meant to be baked for a half hour. When I tried heating it in the microwave, I ended up with hot pie filling inside a raw dough crust. Oh well. Not the worst thing I've ever eaten.
The contents of my freezer looked useless, except I thought how nice it would be if I could get the gravy and vegetables from that pot pie into my star noodles. In this case, the raw dough from the defrosted pie is somewhat well suited to soup, ending up sorta like dumplings if you work it right. Either that or it disintegrates into a mush which thickens the soup.
So do not fear using a pot pie as a soup base. For was it not Master Yoda who said, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Similarly George W. Bush said, "Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution," as he tried to build anger into hatred, hatred into support for his war on Afghanistan.
Where was I going with this? I don't know. Just don't fear experimenting with ingredients, or it could lead to suffering (in as far as you'll keep eating the same boring meals). And maybe we wouldn't have to suffer listening to Bush if someone gave him a big bowl of chicken and stars.
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Boil
enough water to cook pasta. After the stars have been boiling about
7 minutes, pick one out and throw it on the ceiling. That's
supposed to be some kind of test. If it sticks, the pasta is done.
Or maybe if it doesn't stick, then they're done? If you throw it
on the ceiling in the first place, you fail the more important part of
the test.
