What's for Supper?

This is a question I ask myself daily.  Hopefully before anybody else asks me so that I can have an answer.  I have successfully done the meal planning thing in the past and somehow gotten away from it.  I really need to get back to that.  It was such a load off to get everything figured out ahead of time.  That was not the case last night though.  I got home from work around 7 pm with still no plan in mind.  I thought maybe I'd resort to my default scrambled eggs meal, but nobody was interested.

So, I opened the cupboard to see what inspired me.  This is what I came up with (and no, I don't keep frozen veggies and cooked meat in my pantry).  It doesn't really have a name.  It was creamy roast turkey with broccoli and fettuccine noodles.  Yes it includes cream soup. Sorry.  I was in a time and energy crunch. Feel free to make your own gluten/MSG/random ingredient free version of this ingredient.  It also includes sour cream.  That didn't make the picture because I added it as an afterthought at the end to achieve a more desirable texture to the "sauce".  In case you are wondering, yes I do keep bags of frozen roast turkey in my freezer.  I buy them around Thanksgiving when they are either free or dirt cheap with my grocery order then roast them up, shred the meat and package it up for individual meals.  Its a lifesaver on nights like this.

The lineup: fettuccine, shredded roasted turkey, chicken soup base,  golden mushroom soup, broccoli florets, dried minced garlic, my not-so-super-secret savory herb rub, oh and sour cream.

This is what the "sauce" looks like when its cooked and before  I thought to add sour cream.

This is pretty straight forward.  Boil water for the noodles.  Plop frozen turkey chunks into a big deep skillet with some chicken broth (hence the soup base).  I mixed up about 2 cups of broth for this.  Season with herb rub, garlic and some black pepper.  When the turkey is sufficiently thawed and shredding apart, add mushroom soup and stir.  Then add broccoli and cook til tender crisp.  

Meanwhile, boil your noodles til just about done.  Drain the noodles, but save a cup or so of pasta water in case you need more liquid in your sauce.  Dump most of the noodles into the pan with the sauce, toss around a bit to mix, simmer a minute or two to let everything come together and the pasta finish cooking.  This is also when it occurred to me to add some sour cream.  It just wasn't "saucy" enough once I added all the pasta.

The finished product.  Served with mandarin oranges and sliced strawberries.  This is my son's plate.  He was slow coming to the table, so his plate got to be my prop.

The kids loved this meal.  I thought it was ok, but missing something, so if anybody reading this has a great idea to add something that will take it up a notch, please leave me a comment.