One of my favorite vegetarian dishes is pasta. My boyfriend likes his with canned Alfredo sauce and mushrooms on it. I like that too, but when I make it I usually use herbs, sometimes with chunks of fresh tomato tossed in for flavor, color, and health.

While cooking the pasta I heat a frying pan containing a small amount of oil and sliced fresh garlic. My choices for oil are olive oil, coconut oil, or sunflower oil… all organic. For this, I usually choose olive oil because I love the flavor. To my garlic I add salt, thyme, parsley, kelp flakes, oregano and basil. When the pasta is cooked and drained, I put some in the frying pan with my oil and herbs, and mix it together. The fresh tomatoes go in last, when the heat is turned off. Then I put it all on a plate with Parmesan cheese on top, and sometimes a little grated sharp cheddar right under the Parmesan. Mmmmm… I am such a pasta lover.

You notice I share my recipes but usually don’t mention amounts. I expect that we all have have an inner instinct for knowing how much to use. Learning to rely on that is part of becoming a confident cook. My grandmother never used measuring cups or spoons, and I rarely do.

Pasta choices… my boyfriend likes fettuccine. Honestly, I like it all but usually use fettuccine, spaghetti, or macaroni.

A few nights ago I went to the regular Friday evening fund-raising dinner at our local art center. This is a vegan/vegetarian dinner. They served big pasta shells with some kind of sauce (I should have asked) along with a green salad, cooked beets, and a slice of homemade bread. The dinner was satisfying and delicious, and for five dollars, I enjoyed the meal and the company of artistically minded people. The money is to be used to build a new art center in our remote mountain town.

Wow! Mombu Cuisine - a cooking forum - recommended this site and gave it an 8.4 rating. I’m happy with that.

Thanks Tager!

Country Kitchen Pantry Recommendation.

Since I work at a restaurant that serves awesome deli sandwiches, I get to bring home empty pickle jars that are very helpful as far as keeping my staples goes. Each is filled with a different vegetarian delight food like hummus mix, lentils, brown rice, and falafel mix. I truly enjoy looking at the jars full of goodies. They are so colorful - and the textures are all different.

I think falafel mix is particularly good, health-wise. It is made from chick peas. I’ve had some that was too spicy, but what I buy up in Medford, Oregon is excellent quality and enjoyable. If I were hiking in the wilderness with a little stove, this is one food I’d take with me for nutrition and to provide lightweight staples. You can mix falafel mix with cooked, crushed beans to produce a thick textured burger patty. Fry that up, and eat in a hamburger bun with all the condiments, lettuce, onion, and tomato.

Recently my significant other, the magnificent Bob, decided to make beans and rice the new staple of his diet. First let me say I’m very proud of this man. He was a meat eater all his life until gout stopped him from eating 90% of the foods he loved, including red meat. Now he’s recovering thanks to some medication, but rather than going back to the bad diet, he’s adjusted to being mostly vegetarian, though he still eats fish. I don’t, so we usually don’t share meals. He cooks what he wants and I cook what I want. I’ve gone on a vegan diet. Anyhow, as I was about to say, Bob wants to eat rice and beans. So I’ve been cooking them, keeping them on hand in the fridge. I’ve been using pinto beans. The rice and beans fill several jars in my pantry. I find that when I’m cooking them constantly, I go through the beans pretty fast - so I need more than one of the gallon jars full of them.

I have granola in one jar. I’ve been using that to make the sweet treat I mentioned in my last post. More on that in another post. I’ve morphed the recipe into breakfast bars! Recipe to be announced SOON. I keep the rice flour in another gallon jar, and cinnamon I bought in bulk in another smaller jar. Cinnamon and rice flour provide the outer coating for these treats.

Anyhow, if you need jars, ask at your local restaurant or deli. If they use pickles, they probably have more jars than they want. The one gallon mayonnaise jars are plastic, but they’re handy too… I use them for pasta and beans.

Suggestion: Stock up on as many dry staples as you can.

I don’t know if any of you were in a situation anything like mine. If you identify, let me know. The problem was that my mother didn’t teach me how to cook, so as a young woman I was very much lacking in self-confidence when it came to cooking. Plus dinner preparations in our parental home were less than optimal. My mom woke up from a nap and went into the kitchen, not wanting to deal with us kids, and fixed something simple like hamburger patties or hamburger helper, and warmed-up green peas with a salad. There was always a salad, and that’s what she asked one of her daughters to fix. Honestly, my mom was and is a wonderful cook. She can do amazing things with food when she needs to. I’m just giving you a worst-case scenario. Still, I didn’t learn much about cooking.

Also my grandmother, her mother, was a fantastic cook. Dinners at her house were always wonderful. But neither of them took time to teach me how to cook, except for one incident I clearly remember. My mom wanted to teach me how to bake a cake and so she taught me - from a box. I remember baking a marble cake - I think it was chocolate cake mix with white cake mix swirled in. Now, that was a good, positive experience, and I thank Mom for it. But when I was 18, on my own, trying to start a family, I was clueless in the kitchen. I knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches from processed prepared sliced cheese, and a tossed green salad, and oatmeal for breakfast, and that’s about it.

Of course this didn’t go over good with my first boyfriend (later he was my first husband) but he tried to help. We lived in San Francisco - at first in the Haight Ashbury, then in Noe Valley, and later in the Haight Ashbury again. At that time we started making bread together every day. He knew more about making bread than I did as apparently his mother did it. I, however, had never seen anyone making bread.

I’d seen my grandmother making pie dough. Once when I stayed with her as a teenager she decided to make a peach cobbler. I asked her to teach me how but she said something like, “Not now, I’m busy, I just want to do this and get it over with.” She put flour in a bowl, then butter. This she cut in with two knives. Nothing was measured. She poured in the appropriate amount of water, and voila! Perfect pie dough. Then she lined her 9×13″ pan with dough, put two big cans of peach slices in, poured in some sugar… again, no need to measure anything. Then she covered it with more dough and put it in the oven for an hour or so. It always came out perfect and I learned almost nothing about how to do it myself. I think I tried to make a peach cobbler once and it didn’t turn out nearly as good as my grandmother’s.

Anyhow, back to bread-baking in the Haight Ashbury. I tried every day to bake bread right, but usually it was a failure. Usually the bread didn’t rise right, or wasn’t cooked enough, or something would happen to make it less than perfect. It took months before I could produce edible bread. Somehow I had decided I couldn’t cook, so I couldn’t. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew nothing about being the kind of woman who could prepare a wholesome meal every evening, regularly and dependably. Plus my boyfriend and I had different eating preferences. I was a vegetarian; he wasn’t. He brought in steaks to cook for himself and didn’t want most of what I wanted to eat anyway.

So that was the beginning of my cooking career. I wish I’d worked in a restaurant back then; it would have made me feel much more comfortable with the issue of cooking food. Instead I suffered for many years, trying to learn to cook. Even to this day I still have times where a fear of cooking comes upon me. That lack of self-confidence is hard to get away from.

Because of all this, it is strange that I have a cooking blog, don’t you think? I can cook now, and have collected my own workable, practical vegetarian recipes over the years, but I’m hardly a natural at it.

I’ve been having pain in my left thumb for a few years. I thought it was from an injury, but since I started working at the pizza place it spread to my right thumb and right ankle. I went to the doctor and found out it is arthritis. Some days at work, the pain was acute. Of course the doctor’s office didn’t offer anything but motrin to cover up the pain.

I’ve been doing some research, and discovered that wheat contributes to the problem, so I’ve been working on cutting wheat out of my diet, for the most part. And since I’ve been avoiding wheat, the arthritis pain has 90% disappeared. That’s the good news.

Because of my switch from using wheat, I’ve been experimenting with making things from rice flour, using no yeast. I made some great tortillas. Flour tortillas are easy to make - they are simply flour, salt, oil, and water. Here’s my recipe:

Flour Tortillas

A couple cups of flour, more or less.

Mix the flour with about a teaspoon of salt, more or less.

Into the flour/salt mixture, pour some olive oil. I probably use about 1 tablespoon or 2. Sorry I don’t have exact amounts, but this is how I cook.

Stir that up, as well as possible, then add warm water until you have a nice paste that sticks together a bit.

Take the flour mixture out of the bowl and knead it on a flour-covered board. I just use the drain board next to my kitchen sink.

Nice floury mess. I like that.

Then put it back into the bowl. You can let it sit for an hour or so, then knead again.

This time make little balls out of the flour. The balls should be about two or three inches across. Let them sit a while, then get ready to roll them out.

Heat up a large skillet or other flat surface. I use a flat griddle sort of thing. Prepare it with cooking oil to coat the surface.

Now the rolling pin thing is a matter of choice. I used to use a regular rolling pin, but the Mexican cook who taught me to make tortillas used a simple round piece of wood about the thickness of the bar you put your clothing on in the bedroom closet. Recently I saw such a piece of wood in a hardware store, bought it, and asked my boyfriend to cut a 12″ length for me. This is perfect for rolling out tortillas. I just push it back and forth rather than using handles.

Anyhow, roll out the tortillas. They have to be super thin. You may have to experiment with this for a time until you find the thickness that works best, according to your tastes. And as soon as that puppy is rolled out, toss it onto the hot griddle.

As that tortilla browns, start rolling out another one. Turn the tortilla over once to do the other side. If there are air pockets rising while it cooks, you know you did the right thing. Those are the best.

When cooked, the tortillas can rest in a warm bed made from a bathroom towel. Yes, cover them completely to keep them warm for dinner.

Filling: The fillings I’ve been making lately have started with cooked lentils. I love lentils. This week I combined the lentils with rice and dried green peas. I put them in olive oil, smash them together with a fork, and simply warm them. I cooked the lentils with garlic and onion and salt, but at this point I like to add more garlic powder. I love that garlic taste.

Toppings for the tortillas - use whatever you have that you like:

Diced fresh tomatoes

Chopped onions

Grated cheese

Sprouts or lettuce

Sauteed mushrooms

Note: On days I don’t feel like making my own flour tortillas, I use corn tortillas instead.