Vegan Soapbox Convenience Store Challenge: Spicy Sweet Spaghetti

This past week Kelly was telling me about a contest she found on the Vegan Soapbox website, where readers were challenged to walk into a convenience store with ten dollars, and come out with ingredients to make a vegan dinner.

Here are the official rules:

The rules:

1. Go into any convenience store with ten bucks.
2. Choose vegan food.
3. Take it back to your house or motel room, add water, spices, herbs, or nutritional yeast if you like, to make a meal that serves one or more.
4. Add nothing else.

That’s it. The meal does not have to be super-healthy, low-fat, low-sugar or anything like that. It does need to be something that most of us would recognize as a meal, not a snack.

Post your pictures or at least your description of what you got and what you made here and tell us what convenience store you bought from. OR post your meal on your blog and give us the link here. [edited Mar 2, 2009: can post your meal on your blog and put the link here]

Deadline: March 31, 2009

On Thursday night, while we were out, we hit up a few convenience stores, but it was only on the third try (QuikTrip), that we found success.

Kelly had an idea to use Bisquick that would have worked, but we had a question about whether or not the egg replace was allowed under the rules. Looking at the ingredients available, and based on something Kelly mentioned at a previous store, a recipe came to me. To top it off, with a $1.36 left to spend, I found a 99 cent bag of vegan doritos as “dessert”. The following is the recipe (as written up by Kelly):

Shane’s Spicy Sweet Spaghetti

Ingredients

16 oz. pasta (we used thin spaghetti, American Beauty brand)
16 oz. salsa (we used medium, Don Pablo brand)
15.25 oz whole kernel corn (we used Green Giant brand, and only half a can)
5 oz Spanish / Manzanilla olives (we used Best Choice brand, and only 1/4 of a jar)
2 1/8 oz bag (or more) Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos
salt to taste

Directions

1. Prepare the pasta according to the directions on the package.

2. While the pasta is cooking, empty the entire jar of salsa into a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer. Add corn and quartered Spanish olives.

3. When pasta’s done, top with salsa sauce, season with salt to taste, and top with a Dorito(s) for decoration. Enjoy!

Makes: 2-3 servings of pasta. (The Doritos won’t last but five minutes!)

It was pretty good actually. I often times put Frank’s Original Red Hot on pasta, so the spicy factor is nothing new to me. I would definitely eat this again.