Ordinary to Extraordinary Part 2: Pizza And Asian Noodles

While we love to put together big production meals, complicated dishes, or grilled dinners that take hours to finish, unfortunately we also have to live on a budget, which means we're always on the lookout for ways to make cheap food into something worth getting excited about.

Back in April we posted up the first in a series about taking ordinary ingredients to produce extraordinary meals, covering how to turn $1 seafood into an amazing dinner. This time around we'll be covering two separate dishes we recently made using low-cost base materials.

To start off with, we randomly found a take-and-bake pizza on clearance for $3.49 at Smith's that was due to expire the next day. $3.49 is even cheaper than a Papa Murphy's take-home pizza, and we had plenty of ingredients already sitting in the fridge that would jazz it up nicely.  For a gourmet twist, we also picked up a pack of clearance pancetta (thinly sliced cured Italian bacon).

Here's the full assortment of what will be going on our pizza: pancetta, red and yellow bell peppers, roma tomato, green onion, and poblano pepper. Because all the other ingredients were already needed for other meals that week, we only ended up spending about $5 for a gourmet pizza.

Here we've added on some extra cheese (white cheddar!), along with the diced peppers and green onions.

Finishing off the pizza are slices of the pancetta on the top of the rest of the ingredients.

After about 20 minutes in the oven, the finished pie is crispy, cheesy, and ready to be devoured.

A few months back we discovered our local Big Lots has a variety of different flavored Asian noodle packages, which are essentially higher class (ha!) Ramen noodles, but are still incredibly cheap. To make a package of the noodle soup more exciting, I threw in some ingredients we would be using for salads and stir-fry's later that week. Here's I've sliced up cabbage, green onion, and radish.

I cooked the radish and cabbage in the boiling water with the noodles so they become a bit softer and less firm.

To make this more like a restaurant style meal, I topped the noodles with sesame seeds and spicy Sriracha sauce. If you've never had Srirarcha before, it's frequently used in Asian restaurants and can typically be found in the Asian section of any supermarket - even Walmart.

Great food doesn't have to break the bank, and living on a budget doesn't mean you have to live with bland and boring meals. Now that we've taken a little side trek into our ordinary-turned-extraordinary meals, next month we'll jump into more grilling adventures, different ways to cook pork, and a culinary trek to Canada to try out cuisine inspired by recipes from north of the border.