It's Totally Acceptable To Add Pasta To Your Stir-Fry And Here's Why You Should

Let's be honest: One of the most difficult things in the world to do is to make one single serving of pasta. After all, it's so easy to just plop a whole box of your favorite pasta into a pot of boiling water and walk away, rather than having to factor in how hungry you are at that present moment.  The only problem is that you're going to be left with so much leftover pasta that you don't know what to do with it all. 

Instead of sticking to the basic (and frankly, boring) jarred pasta sauce topping, you can transform your leftover noodles into a tasty stir-fry. When you leave your pasta in the fridge and nuke it in the microwave, it tends to get soft and mushy. If you want to preserve your pasta's texture and add a new dimension of flavor, toss it into a hot, oiled wok with some aromatics like garlic and ginger, veggies, and a protein. Then, add your sauce of choice, and you'll have an even more exciting (and tasty way) to enjoy this all-too-common leftover. 

The go-to pasta for a lot of stir-fries is spaghetti, and it's easy to see why; it's agreeable in terms of shape and in flavor, and it kind of resembles the chow mein noodles you'd find in your Asian takeout meal. But, that doesn't mean the only shape you have room to experiment with is boring spaghetti. Other types of pasta shapes are also well-suited to grabbing onto all that sauce. For one, bucatini has a hole running down through the center, which increases its surface area and ability to hold onto a homemade teriyaki sauce. If you make a ton of macaroni and cheese in your house, you may also have some elbow pasta or cavatappi lying around. If you use these shorter pasta shapes, just be wary that they may not be as conducive to eating with chopsticks as a longer, thinner noodle.

Proteins and vegetables are all fair game when it comes to concocting your stir-fry. Just be wary that you'll want to add items that still retain some texture, rather than get super mushy. Toss some sliced carrots, peppers, and onions into your wok to complement the relative softness of the pasta.