What can you make with a fully stocked pantry?

I suppose you could make anything you set your mind to - I decided to pull out some random ingredients and see what came to me. Here are my ingredients:


Hmm.....I probably can't make fudge with these......Pumpkin pasta it is!

Pumpkin Pasta:
1 box whole wheat penne
1/2 can cooked pumpkin (not pie filling - ick)
1/2 can evaporated milk (or 3/4 cup regular milk)
1 cup chicken stock
1 yellow onion
3/4 pound ground turkey
fresh sage
salt
pepper
nutmeg
Parmesan cheese (for the table)

First cook a box of pasta according to the directions on the box. I used whole wheat penne, but feel free to use your favorite kind. While it cooked, I put my skillet over medium heat, added a little olive oil and when it got hot, added my chopped onion. Here it is now:


Once the onion softened, I turned up the heat a big and threw in half a pack of ground turkey.


I stirred it up and waited for the turkey to turn brown (pink = raw meat = death. brown = cooked meat = yum).

Then I threw in half a can of pumpkin.....


And mixed it up.


Then in went about a cup of chicken broth:


And half a can of evaporated milk (cream would be better - but I didn't have any. Regular milk would be good too).


Then I ripped up some sage and threw it in (this made Zack complain. He hates big pieces of herbs. But I'm the cook and I'm too lazy to chop them, so he can just pick them out if he wants. And he does).


(I also threw in some nutmeg. You can kind of tell in the picture above. If I was Rachael Ray, this is where I would say, nutmeg is the thing that makes people go, "ooh, what IS that?" But I'm not Rachael Ray. She's a millionaire with four television shows. I'm just a poor scrub with wireless internet and an iBook). The pasta was done now, so I threw it in the pan.


Then I mixed it all up and tasted it. It needed more salt, so I added some and put it in my pretty pasta bowl from Target.


All ready to eat! All it needs is Parmesan cheese. Lots of it. Enjoy!