Recipe from the Garden: Pasta with Vegetables and Herbs

This isn’t really a recipe to follow, it’s more about taking what you have in the garden and cooking it up with some pasta. Easy peasy and a great way to use the fresh vegetables and herbs from the garden.

This is probably a good time for me to mention that I have to eat gluten-free. After years of feeling ill and suffering from abdominal pain, nausea, weight loss, and more, I finally was diagnosed with Celiac disease. Actually, I’m the one who figured it out, not my doctor. I read an article about it, asked to be tested, and a biopsy revealed the truth — it changed my life. Eating gluten-free has been a challenge at times — more-so in the early years of diagnosis — but it has been my life since 2004 so it’s just ingrained in who I am anymore. So when I say I make pasta with vegetables and herbs from the garden, I mean gluten-free pasta. So instead of wheat pasta, we’re talking rice, corn, or quinoa pasta.

Vegetables that you will often find in my garden and in my gluten-free pasta are peas, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, and/or spinach. Herbs often include fresh basil, oregano, and thyme, or sometimes sage instead. I cook the veggies in olive oil with garlic or with herb butter (see July 21st  post for herb butter recipe). Then I mix in the herbs and pasta, and sometimes add shredded or grated parmesan cheese. If I’m feeling like I need a little protein, I’ll cook up some salmon or chicken to go in it. (I should probably mention that I don’t eat red meat.) Sometimes I’ll eat it just like that and other times I’ll make or buy an Alfredo or cheese sauce of some kind.

Gluten-free pasta with salmon and some vegetables and herbs from the garden.

This is one of my quick, go-to meals. If I am too tired to follow a recipe or think of something to make, I just walk out to the Kitchen Garden, pick some vegetables and snip some herbs, and my brain thanks me for it.