Curried pasta salad with tuna

My husband hates cold salads-- the kind with pasta or potatoes.

Today for lunch I needed a meal for me.

So I prepared 10 ounces of multigrain penne.

In my skillet, I poured 2 tablespoons cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, 2/3 cup frozen peas, 2/3 cup black beans, 2 teaspoons curry powder, 2 teaspoons parsley, 1 teaspoon garlic powder, 2 tablespoons flax seed and 3 tablespoons sunflower seeds. Heat and mix thoroughly.

Now if you want to keep it vegan, mix two tablespoons vegan mayonnaise and the noodles. Then add the hot "sauce." I also added a can of tuna.

Vegan Daddy Broccoli Pasta

Last night, Daddy cooked dinner for the wee one while Mommy worked. He opted for pasta, because his brain ends up on spastic meltdown when he tries to cook without dairy.

Apparently, he made a wheat rotini dish with strips of vegetarian Boca Chik*n patties cut into strips and fresh broccoli with a sauce of cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil and a touch of organic Earth Balance margarine.

Child loved it.

He made me a variation with Morningstar breakfast patties cut into chunks.

Pasta Basilique

The title of this post and this meal is inspired by my favorite movie, a French film called, The Closet.

The main character makes spaghetti with fresh basil every time his teenaged son comes to visit.

Tonight I prepared some spaghetti (mixing whole wheat with regular white).

I heated two small cans of plain tomato sauce, one half teaspoon four color pepper, two teaspoons garlic powder and about 1 cup fresh basil leaves from my garden, torn into large strips.

Serve with grated Romano and shredded asagio.

Mommy's meatballs

• 1/2 cup mixed Italian vegetables, smashed
• about 1 cup hamburger
• about 3/4 cup cheddar cheese cubes
• 1/4 cup breadcrumbs from homemade bread
• 3 small cloves roasted garlic
• 6 ounces tomato paste
  

Smoosh vegetables and garlic with pastry blender. Add all ingredients except cheese. When everything is mixed, fold in cheese.

I'm going to fry them in the Le Creuset skillet in the extra virgin olive oil from Forks Mediterranean Deli.

Okay, so I based this on a recipe from about.com and I noticed it didn't include egg. My meatballs don't appear to be binding. I don't know if it's because I'm frying them and turning them too much or because of the egg. Or because of some of my strange ingredients.

I finally smashed them all and added the sauce to the frying pan and let it all simmer into meat sauce.

Pork Citrus Pasta/ Day's Meal Plan

For breakfast we had oatmeal with fresh blueberries.

For dinner I took the leftover chili with cornbread dumplings out of the freezer since I have class until 4, and a career fair after that.

For breakfast tomorrow, I took sticky buns out of the freezer. We have a bunch of errands to do in the a.m. and thought sticky buns would be fun.

For lunch today, there's not enough pork with vegetables from last night for everyone. So, I took the pork, and cut it into bitsize pieces and took another bag of the steam-in-bag spring vegetables in citrus sauce and made some multigrain rotini and served the whole thing over pasta.

Daddy pasta

Last night, I had three meals in mind. But, since my husband got home from work first, he whipped up his famous Daddy Pasta for an Army. He makes more than a pound of pasta, because he thinks it will make good lunches to take to work.

In this case, he made a huge quantity of wheat pasta with red sauce, peas and vegan Boca burger.

The sauce, as usual, is the cheap cans of plain tomato sauce with his special seasoning added.

Peach and Almond Pasta

Leftovers are often the key to stretching the grocery budget. After Friday's dinner, we had eaten all the pork with apples but we hadn't finished all the gravy. In this particular case, pork with apples became pork with peaches and apples (not to be confused with pork with peaches and snow peas) because we ran out of apples.

I didn't want to waste that yummy gravy so we heated it up and added slivered almonds. We served as the sauce for multigrain pasta. It was fabulous. Though raisins would have made it better. We didn't have raisins,

Also, went bike riding five miles this afternoon. My water bottle is plastic and it always tastes plastic to me. I hate warm plastic-flavored water. And I knew by the time I needed the water it would be very warm. To combat this, I brewed a glass of Celestial Seasonings Wild Berry Zinger tea and threw it, bag and all, into my water bottle with all the ice I could stuff in there and some more water.