Food From The Garden

This evening for dinner, I made my second quinoa pasta. My grandparents  got me a couple boxes of the Ancient Harvest brand when we got together earlier this week. It's my go to brand for my quinoa and like I said in a recent post, I think it's really cool that it comes in pasta form! The funny part is that after I ate the pasta, I saw in my Instagram feed that Lauren Ginger (@laurenginger) from naturallylauren.com made the same pasta for dinner tonight too. What a small world! Quinoa is a wonderful superfood and I sneak it into a lot of things. It's the meat on my nachos, I like it in salads, and Gardein brand meatballs are actually made using quinoa. The benefits of quinoa are not just from the culinary standpoint that it's easy to use. There are even more health benefits including but not limited to: 1. Quinoa is a complete protein and is high in protein. Proteins are made from what are called amino acids. There are plenty of amino acids that the body can produce ...

I have been trying to do away with refined wheat products in favor of whole wheat and gluten free options. The one thing that makes that difficult is that I come from a family of pasta lovers and growing up, it was (and remains) a staple in our house. We will never be caught without a shelf in the pantry devoted to pasta and various sauces. Knowing that I was not ready to give up my pasta in taking up this mission, I decided to try various whole wheat and gluten free pastas and see which one I like. My first one is quinoa based because I love quinoa in my salads so I thought it would be fun to try it in pasta form. This one is the Organic Brown Rice and Quinoa Penne from LiveGfree, voted best new product by consumers in 2017. My family is very supportive of me in my endeavors to be a successful vegan (my mom actually helped me start this blog!) so I decided to sometimes have some family members try some of the things I've been eating and share their thoughts (and mine) on the blog...