Red Lentil Pasta with Veggies and Mini Meatballs

I can remember when you couldn't buy gluten free pasta. I ate potatoes or rice as a substitute for pasta, and it was a poor substitute. Now the options are almost endless and I am enjoying it immensely. Even fresh pasta! Something I need to learn to make, for sure.

I was shopping recently in Albertsons and came across and end cap with a whole new selection of certified gluten free pastas from Barilla. At least all new to me. I chose one made of chickpea and a rotini made from red lentil. The ingredients list shows only red lentil and nothing else. How do they do that? 

We decided to use the pasta for one of our clean-out-the-fridge meals. We do this about once a week and cook anything in the fridge that needs to be used up before it spoils. Being that we buy a lot of fresh vegetables, that usually means an assortment of veggies paired with some kind of protein. On this particular night, we had mushrooms and tomatoes we needed to use up and a pound of sausage my husband had taken out of the freezer a couple of days prior that we needed to use. We always have onions and garlic on hand and I keep sweet bell peppers in the freezer. I buy peppers on sale whenever I come across them. I then wash, stem and seed them and freeze them whole on a cookie sheet, then pop them into a freezer bag and store them. We also had broccoli florets in the freezer. That combination of veggies seemed perfect for pairing with pasta and a recipe was born.

I cook my pasta a little differently than most. I use one quart of water to one pound of pasta. In this case, it was half a pound, but the one quart worked just fine. I pour pasta and water into a pot big enough that it is only half full. I always start with cold water and then heat the pasta and water to boiling. This helps to keep the pasta from sticking together. I boil about 2 minutes, then turn off the fire and put on a lid and let the pasta set for 10-15 minutes, depending on the required cooking time. In this case, the suggested cooking time was 7-10 minutes, so I let it set that long. This way I don't have to watch it while I fix the rest of the ingredients. 

When used with one pound of pasta, the water is thick and can be seasoned as a sauce when finished. This saves on water and is less wasteful. I have lived for years in a house that has a well and I always hated pouring four to six quarts of water down the drain after cooking pasta. It just seemed too wasteful and don't get me started on how careless we are on this planet with our water. We can learn to live without gas or oil or uranium, but we cannot survive as a species without clean water. Now...to finish the recipe.

Any vegetables would probably work. We just used what we had on hand. Left over veggies from the fridge or freezer would probably work. Add some tomato sauce and a few chopped olives, whatever is in the pantry. I keep a bottle of spicy olive oil on hand that I make from a recipe called "Alchemy Oil". The recipe is available on the Mother Earth Living website. I like it drizzled over my pasta in lieu of cheese but a little grated cheese works just as well. It's also good on just about everything else.

The recipe is below. I hope you enjoy it!

Red Lentil Recipe