Coupon Cooking - Creative Culinary Couponing

FYI this IS NOT A SPONSORED post, it's just something I came up with in hopes it can be helpful!

Relatively Easy Recipe

Over the last few weeks I have been on a mission to achieve some goals for this year. One of those goals is improvements around my house.  I am they type of person that saves up for a project.  Last year I saved up for a new roof on my house and wrote the cheque on completion of the project.  I know too many people who just buy now and pay on credit.  Let's just say for the most part that never ends well.  This year I have two home improvement ideas in mind, so that means I need to cut back a lot on my spending.

I have really taken to couponing! It started last summer and I have save a lot of cash that way. I try to only use coupons on products that I would normally buy or have wanted to try.  I never just go and buy something because I have a coupon for it.  

Last week I made a full meal with products that I had bought with coupons.

The Ingredients Included

1. Barilla Pasta that was on sale and I had a coupon, so I paid next to nothing for it
2. Maple Leaf Prime Chicken which you can see is regularly $10.94 but I had a $2 off coupon
3. Philly Cooking Creme which was on for $1.99 and I had a $1 off coupon (was wanting to try)
4. Sobey's vegetable mix which I received bonus Sobey's Points for

Plus I had enough Sobeys Club points saved up that I didn't really end up paying anything for these ingredients!

I have been wanting to try the Philly Cooking Creme and because I would end up getting it for 99 cents I figured this would be a great way to try it.  I wasn't sure how to use it so I went on their website and loosely followed their Creamy Chicken Florentine recipe. I tend to only cook with what I have so I change recipes around all the time.

• I started by boiling the pasta in a large pot Note* I always boil pasta longer than it says on the box so if you like a softer pasta like I do then make sure it has been cooking for quite a while before you continue on with the recipe.
• Normally I either boil or steam my chicken before using it in any recipe  but because I was already straying from the original recipe I didn't want to really mess it up, so I did fry the chicken in a large frying pan
• When the pasta was basically done cooking I added in close to half the bag of frozen vegetables (they are smaller bags than most store brand vegetable mixes)
• I let that come back to a boil
• When everything was cooked I poured/scraped the entire tub of Philly Cooking Creme into the frying pan
• Then ladled in some of the cooking water from the pasta pot into the frying pan with the chicken making sure to stir over a high heat to make a quick sauce.
• I drained the pasta/veggie mix and added it to the frying pan and kept stirring it so that the excess water would boil off and thicken the sauce a bit.

Here's the end result!

Note* I will make this again, but I will steam the chicken first before adding it to the frying pan.  It was a little dry because it didn't have time to absorb too much of the sauce,  That being said the left overs the next day had absorbed the sauce = YUM!