Quick and Easy Gluten Free Pasta Dish

What beautiful weather we are having here at the moment in Durban, it really is so nice to be able to go back to the beach a couple of times a week with my dogs now it is warming up! They love it too!… going hunting for fish heads… eeewww! But dogs will be dogs…

Today (Sunday) was all about cleaning (our house from head to toe! because a clean home is a happy home! lol) repairing (the wooden laundry basket that got damaged in our recent move – with a piece of wood my fiance found in the garden – talk about reduce, reuse, recycle! go Brent!) and just generally finishing old jobs that needed putting to bed… Like fixing the laundry basket, putting up a shelf at home and at my office, and clearing out the last few boxes that we had not finished unpacking yet, 2 months later…. oh well! 

Then after using up lots of energy, we decided we needed something very filling for dinner so I thought I would post some pictures and share this really easy and healthy dish I made today. It might also come in handy if ever you are stuck for ideas.

* Pasta (for this I chose Glutagons 100% rice pasta as it is wheat and gluten free)

* 1 pepper (red and yellow are quite tasty)

* Pesto (I chose one that has only olive oil in it and no canola oil – as canola oil contains small levels of erucic acid, approx. 3% and erucic acid causes scarring of the heart and kidneys so best we all avoid this and not take any chances I feel!)

* Mushrooms

* Cold pressed Organic Extra-Virgin Olive Oil (from Spar)

I would love to say that all of today’s ingredients were organic but unfortunately not. Only the EV olive oil was.

My organic veggie bag was not available this week else I would have used ingredients from that so I had to settle for conventionally grown.

On to how to make this simple pasta dish…

1. Start then first with putting enough water for your pasta in a pot on the hob, on high heat until it comes to a rolling boil.

2. In the meantime, prepare your ‘shrooms and pepper(s)

To clean the mushrooms I just wipe them with some tissue as a good friend of mine who owns an amazing restaurant in Jeffrey’s Bay called “3 Fat Fish“… they are on facebook for those who are interested or might be going there… taught  me that to wash them in water makes them lose some of there flavour, so it is better this way to not “wash it away” but “wipe it away”.

Interesting huh?!

Then roughly chop these and your pepper(s)… depending how many people you are feeding then just adjust your quantity.. for 2 people which my meal was aimed at, I used 1 whole pepper and 3/4 of a small punnet of mushrooms.

3. Once your water is boiling… add enough pasta for each person…

To judge this I make my fist in to a ball, (as I am using spaghetti pasta it is easy with this type), and about 2 inches wide filled with pasta will be usually sufficient for one person, just repeat this for the amount of mouths you have to feed. Do keep stirring with this type of pasta as it gets very sticky, and it is not a good idea to add olive oil to prevent the stickiness, as it will become a damaged oil through heating it on the hob = in turn causing damage for your body and cells.

4. Then once that is ready (approx. 8minutes later), take it off the hob and strain.

5. Next put the pasta back in the pot you had it in when it was boiling and add the pesto (I used the whole tub for 2 of us) and then throw in the mushrooms and pepper. Give it a good mix, splash on some olive oil – and voila!

A nice quick, easy and delicious meal!

 For those of you who make this dish, do please leave me your feedback on my blog here! It is so appreciated 🙂I told you being healthy could be fun and easy!!! Enjoy peeps!

Also, this type of pasta is a good idea to be apart of everyone’s diet, as well as those who are gluten and wheat intolerant. All of us should be rotating our grains throughout the week, and not just having the same one all the time. This way when we rotate – we are ensuring we are getting other nutrients as not all grains contain the same nutrients.        🙂