Musgo - Fiasco?

Last night we had a musgo fiasco.

from Free Retro Graphics

Ok, well, that's stretching it a bit.

But supper was not a success. I'm not surprised honestly. I was simply making do. Thanks to my husband's work schedule my menu plan this week got shaken up. Last night instead of our planned culinary adventure (which will take place this weekend Lord willing!) I threw together a musgo version of spaghetti.

What's musgo? Everything in the refrigerator must go.

We had a couple things-- healthy things- that were not going to last the weekend. I needed to use them up. We had a quarter jar of Newman's Own pasta sauce and a 1/2 jar of a brand I picked up on sale to try at The Fresh Market. Both of them had a different texture. Not quite chunky, not quite smooth. We're not fans of that texture. Neither brand will be purchased again soon. Well, actually, I just need to throw together a batch of my mom's spaghetti sauce (a Frugal Gourmet recipe she's been making since the very early 1990s).

So, two brands of pasta sauce- neither of them favorites- were tossed into the pot. A quick glance in the vegetable drawer reviled 1/2 head of broccoli about to go limp. Hey, hadn't I read that people sometimes put broccoli in spaghetti sauce? 'Course I had. Plus, tons of vitamins! So into the pot went slices of broccoli "trees". Oh, and a touch of tofu. Just because it was sitting there begging to be used. Heat up some spaghetti, wash lettuce for salad, slice the remaining bread. Viola! Supper is served!

And oh, yes, the ate it. Not a ton but they ate it. They actually did better with the spaghetti than I did. I mostly stuck with salad!

from clker free clip art

Lessons learned:

1- Make sure when I get my tofu-to-sauce ratio right! If there are any chunks bigger than a little piece of ground beef, the texture won't be quite right and it won't blend in with the sauce the way tofu is supposed to blend with other flavors. Mash, mash,  mash and mash again.

2- If you add broccoli to pasta sauce, chop it really, really fine. You do not want large chunks of it- or any stems remaining- floating in the sauce because it makes it much harder to eat and less like spaghetti. The texture becomes a bit of a turn-off. To fix it, either chop it into really really small pieces, or put your pasta sauce with the broccoli in the blender!

3- Don't try combining two different brands of pasta sauce when both have been flops. If I must doctor them, get some spices, seasonings, and more tomato products and re-maker the flavors from the bottom up.