Creative Cooking: Poker Pasta or Risotto?

This is not a cooking tutorial / recipe post.  I mean, what we made is not good enough to share as something delicious.  It's just to share how we fooled our family with these poker cards pasta as rice.

I was in the grocery shop and found these super cute pasta.  They are tiny little poker cards symbols.

The bag says it makes 6 servings.  I thought that wouldn't be much, so I boiled the whole pack.  Turns out it was way too much.  I didn't know what to do with it, so we decided to make creamy pesto sauce. We are all trying to lose a few pounds, so instead of real cream, we use plain yogurt instead.  To add some texture to the pasta, we have broccoli and to give it a meaty feel, we have mushrooms.

Lets start cooking!

1. chop up the veggies.

2. Add some oil to the pan and start stir frying the mushrooms.

3. Add in the broccoli.  

At this point, we realized our pan is too small.  Or we just have way too much stuff.  

When the veggie begins to book through, turn off the heat and put the veggies aside.

4. Turn on the heat, pour in the yogurt, pesto sauce and add some spice! Stir stir stir. 

5. Pour in the veggies.

6. Pour in the pasta.

OMG!  It looked like it was over flowing.  We had way too much pasta bits!

7.  To make the whole thing a little thicker, I threw in some Kraft processed cheese.

Let it simmer and stir a few minutes....the water from the veggie and mushroom is all absorbed.

The finished product doesn't look so bad after all....right?

Taste-wise, it's alright.  Pretty good, I'd say.  You can't really go wrong with store bought pesto sauce anyways.  Gave some to my parents and they totally thought it's risotto.  They were quite surprised to know it's pasta.  Anyways, isn't it cute to have poker pasta?

I feel sorry for whoever had to clean up though.  There were little poker pasta all over the stove and counter.  I don't know why it always gets so messy when we cook.

Chi & Cho