Scratch Cooking October 12th

6 pm on Monday. Cranky, tired, sore. Doctor said to go ahead and eat wheat, because, the wheat and gluten allergy tests came back negative. Made the gnocchi with wheat flour on Saturday night and woke up at 2 am with excruciating neck and hip pain. More excruciating pain last night kept me up for 3 hours. Read on the internet today that not eating wheat or gluten for many months can very well result in a false negative. Ugggggghhhhh. Popping extra strength tylenol like candy all day. More work to do. Hungry. Want to open a bag of rice pasta and boil it. Want to so badly. But here's what happened instead.

I cut up half a kabocha squash and baked it in olive oil, salt and pepper. I stuck it in a 400 degree oven.

My daughter was enlisted to chop an onion, a few carrots from the garden, some broccoli and some grean beans. We also had a few peas from the garden and some spinach. I made a pot of white rice. We sauteed the veggies in sesame oil. When they were soft and starting to brown, we threw in the cooked rice, a splash of rice vinegar and a splash of wheat-free tamari. We sauteed for a few minutes and tossed in a beaten egg and stirred until cooked.

And so, it was fried rice Monday night when it could have been lazy, tired, cranky, open a package of something overly salted and with preservatives in it Monday night.

Something I have noticed since we started doing this; not only do we have hardly any garbage, which has been true since we started composting a few years ago, but we also have hardly any recycling. Of course, less packaged foods means less packaging! Since I hate walking out to the alley to take out the garbage and recycling, I am totally loving the minimized waste, in addition to the reduced footprint on the planet.

Tomorrow is member day at the Coop. 10% off on everything in the place. I plan to do a bit of stocking up on ingredients. The great thing is, I skip all the canned and packaged food aisles and make a strategic strike on the bulk bins!