don't you love when you make something fab from simple ingredients?

sometimes my bff and i get together to cook big batches of food for the week to split.  it makes our lives easier, it's cheaper, and we can get more done together then apart.  one day, i am going to either videotape or photograph one of our epic sessions, but let me summarize this week's...

we usually pick dishes that will be relatively healthy and easily re-invented the rest of the week.  this week, we made french onion soup which is good as is, but can be thickened to make gravy; basic rice pilaf which can be flipped and twisted endlessly; 3 diff kinds of chicken:  zucchini-stuffed breasts, ale braised thighs, and sweet and spicy sesame leg quarters; we made 4 individual lasagnas (which weren't originally planned, but i saw some gorgeous pasta at the market, so...) using the leftover zucchini stuffing and ingredients already on hand; roasted corn and grape tomatoes; roasted beets; and an epic dessert which was a spice cake mix-turned-carrot cake w/ pumpkin spice mousse in the middle, and homemade cream cheese frosting.

anyway...  i say all this to say...

it happens to the best of us; you're making lasagna and a chunk of the noodles glue themselves together.  well, luckily we didn't need that portion of noodles anyway b/c we only had 4 individual ramekins and my friend wanted to throw them out, but i thought for sure i could do something with them:  something spaetzle-like and that's what i want to tell you about.  ;)

after sitting in the fridge overnight, the noodles were surprisingly easy to seperate, esp the ones that weren't cooked all the way.  i ended up being able to use all the noodles except two which were cooked too much to separate.  anyway, so i cut the lasagna noodles (which were non-traditional to begin w/ ...  they were 4x4 square) into strips.  i heated my saute pan, browned some butter w/ some fresh thyme and garlic cloves, then tossed in the noodle strips w/ a little bit of water and salt to complete the cooking process.  once the water was evaporated completely, i turned the flame way up so the noodles would brown like spaetzle do and when they were browned enough, i added a teensy bit of half and half to reduce and get thick.  when the cream was the correct thickness, i added some of the corn/tomato mix and beets that we made.  OH-EM-GEE...  this was prob the best thing to come out of my personal kitchen in a bit, made even better b/c it was a surprise dish made w/ a previously unusable ingredient.

here are some pics (the pasta was sun-dried tomato, hence the orange)...

so my question to my peeps is this:  has this ever happened to you?  tell me bout it!  pleeeeease!  LOL.  =))  til next time.