Buffalo Turkey Alfredo

If you remember back to the previous post, you might recall that I wound up with an extra potato and onion, as well as a gigantic pan I had forgotten to use for cooking large amounts of food.  This post will tell the tale of how I decided to cook the excess in the excessively large pan.

This is also the first post of a recipe that I refer to as "Fridge Podge".  You might be asking what fridge podge is, which is reasonable, because I'm pretty sure it isn't actually a word.  A fridge podge is a hodge podge of food thrown together from whatever you happen to have in your fridge.  Or, as my mother prefers to call it, "cooking with what you already have".  This recipe isn't technically a pure fridge podge, since I wound up picking up an onion and a pepper specifically for this while I was buying light bulbs, but the overall idea, and the majority of the ingredients were already owned and waiting for a good usage.

Ingredients:

1 lb ground turkey

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 potatoes

8(ish) oz buffalo wing sauce

1 jar Ragu Roasted Garlic Parmesan Cheese Creation sauce

Instructions:

Dice onion

Begin browning turkey and onion

Forget about the pepper that is half the reason for the recipe

Chop potatoes and add to pan

Continue browning

Stir in buffalo wing sauce

Begin adding the "Alfredo" sauce to the pan

Remember the pepper

Finish stirring the sauce into the mix

Hastily cut the pepper and stir it into the pan

Simmer, covered, for several minutes

This mostly turned out really well.  The buffalo sauce and the pasta sauce combined considerably better than I'd been expecting them to.  The buffalo complements the creamier sauce without overpowering it, resulting in a sauce that is more than the sum of it's parts.  I suspect that this will work with any cream based pasta sauces, and I suspect I'll be experimenting with this in the future.  Unfortunately, I'd put the onions on too late in the process, so they wound up being a bit firmer than I'd intended.

There are a few things I'd do differently in the future.  First I'd begin cooking the potatoes at the same time as I started the onions and ground meat.  The potatoes being a bit softer would help the overall quality of the recipe.  The other thing I'd do is use a green pepper rather than an orange one.  This has nothing to do with the relative flavor of the peppers in respect to each other and everything to do with the aesthetics of the dish.  I'm not usually one to care for such things, but since the buffalo sauce causes everything else in the dish to be uniformly orange, a smidge of contrasting colors could really give the dish some extra pop.

In addition to the more important changes listed above, the ground turkey could be substituted with any other ground meat, or even chunks of meat.  The Roasted Garlic Parmesan sauce could also be replaced with virtually any cream based pasta sauce depending on availability and personal preference.  I'm sure I'll be experimenting with the possibilities in the days to come.