Quote Originally Posted by bdetamore View Post
+1 my favorite. I use tomato (pizza) sauce from bosco's

http://www.boscospizza.com/pages/bosco_sauce.html
I'll have to remember that one. I see that minimus.biz carries it. It'd be nice for the convenience. But since it's full-water it's bound to be kind of heavy, and I don't like the fact that three of the top four ingredients are HFCS, salt, and hydrolyzed food starch.

I sometimes whip up my own sauce with tomato powder, dehydrated garlic/onion/bell pepper/celery, herbs, black pepper and olive oil. (All the items that you can't get in a regular grocery store are from Harmony House.) One of these years I have to get a dehydrator so that I can try drying my homemade sauce; the sauce made from tomato powder just isn't quite the same.

Or I have the pasta al' aglio e olio. Cook the pasta in a freezer bag (anything that cooks in 7 minutes or less will be done in 10 in a freezer bag) with some reconstituted dried veggies, while heating the oil and garlic and a few red pepper flakes and a little sun-dried tomato and maybe some Italian dry sausage (or pouch chicken, or pouch salmon) in the cookpot. Return the pasta to the cookpot when it's done and toss it with the sauce.

Or make a white sauce (powdered milk, cornstarch, white pepper, bay leaf), add dehydrated broccoli, and some sort of hard cheese, and toss the pasta in that.

In all three cases, all the dehydrated ingredients for the sauce go in a little bag tucked in the freezer bag that will be used for the pasta.

I keep my olive oil in a little squeeze bottle that I got at Target, and wrap it in a sandwich-size Ziploc in the food bag. Although I haven't had the inner bottle leak on me yet.

Once you've done the prep of packing the ingredients at home, none of these is any more work than Lipton's, and they're a lot tastier (to me, at least, your taste may vary).