Japanese Italian

The first day of "Eat Out the Pantry Week" is usually pretty decent. Yesterday we dined on oatmeal for breakfast, leftover party food for lunch, and an Italian/Japanese combo for dinner. Soyaki marinated London Broil and Pasta Primavera.

I pulled the London Broil out of the freezer two days ago and started marinated it yesterday morning. We're down to all the inexpensive/unusual cuts of meat from RJ's dad's supply of grass-fed beef and lamb. Hopefully we'll be getting another shipment soon.

I didn't know what to do for our sides. There was tons of pasta in the pantry and a hodge-podge of vegetables in crisper. I hit up my favorite cooking site Simply Recipes and after a thorough recipe search settled on Pasta Primavera.

The recipe calls for pasta sauce and since I didn't have any I dug around the pantry and was thrilled to come up with a jar of tomato paste. Adding some water to the paste I created a thick sauce. Since my sauce was devoid of seasoning I added 4 cloves of garlic and a shallot to my vegetable mixture (saute in the olive oil 1 minute before the adding veggies). And to increase the seasoning even further I doubled the amount of Italian Seasoning and was very generous with the garlic powder, salt and pepper. (My vegetable mixture included: broccoli, red onion, crook neck squash, carrot, celery, and zucchini.)

Finally, I added much more tomato paste sauce than called for. We like alot of flavor, and since we don't like cherry tomatoes I thought I would make up for them with extra sauce.

I'm curious to see what today will bring....