Pasta Plus

I prefer a day at home, puttering around, playing, reading, eating... eating... and maybe walking through the park. And while we make lazy days like that happen often, we also have our busy days, bustling from activity to activity. Of course we still stop to smell (and photograph and draw) the flowers. Which makes us late for dinner.

Monday is usually pasta day. 100% whole wheat pasta is the basis for the meal. We have used ALDI's pasta before, but they just discontinued their whole wheat variety. Kroger makes a decent one, and tonight we are using Bionaturae, which was on clearance at the health food shop. I do try to buy organic wheat products when I can at all afford it. Bionaturae is organic, but cooks up a bit tough.

Once you find a whole wheat- or brown rice or spelt- pasta your family likes, wait for it to go on sale, and STOCKPILE IT! Pasta doesn't take much room, so even if you can't buy other items in bulk, if you eat pasta, it's a good place to start. Just boil it up while you throw the sauce together.

I'm using a pound of grassfed hamburger, plus a jar of red sauce. Look for one in GLASS with no corn syrup and minimal sugar. Most manufactured red sauce contains sugar to balance the acid of the tomatoes; if you use sugar-free, expect a very acidic finished product. Making your own red sauce is a very good option, which I will post about soon.

But tonight, it's 5:27 and we're out of homemade red sauce.

But we can't just throw these three items togather and call it dinner. No siree, our bodies crave more nutrition that that after a long afternoon of activities. So where's the "plus" in our Pasta Plus?

Well, we rummage in the fridge for spinach, garlic, and onion. We find some frozen mushrooms and some dehydrated bell pepper.

We grab our organic pasta and pizza seasoning.

Rose and I start loading the blender. Then I go for the red sauce.

No red sauce.

Seriously? Ya, seriously, and the time is now 5:36. Luckily I do have some tomato paste in the fridge. Phew.

So 3 heaping tablespoons go in on top with a drizzle of brown rice syrup, again, to balance the acidity of the tomato. Salt to your preference.

This makeshift sauce needs some cooking otherwise it will taste raw. Blended and simmering:

Pasta done. Gets tossed generously with extra virgin olive oil.

Put together into a one dish meal. The sprig of kale is tonight's salad. Yes, really. We've had plenty of raw veggies already today.

This photo doesn't do justice to the taste of this meal. Although, do take note that homemade pasta sauce never quite has that RED redness of the store-bought stuff!

And a sampling of what we did today:

A poor, dead one-winged honey bee from the back garden was Isaiah's entry for today.

We do actually do more than nature study in our homeschool! It's just that the birth of this blog coincided with spring's springing, and flowers are more fun to photograph than math lessons!


They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.
-Jane Austen