Tuesday 26 May 2015

Vegan Tex-Mex Pasta Salad!

I cooked! Amazing. Everyone thinks I love to cook cuz I have parties with lots of food, but the truth is, if it's just gonna be C and myself for a meal, I'm pretty lazy. I grew up cooking with my dad (an incredible cook) and volunteering on the La Cuisine "A Team" at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. So I learned to cook for huge crowds at a young age (we're talking eight years old.) Then I was the Hospitality Coordinator at The West End Cultural Centre, a popular music venue here in Winnipeg. It was well known for treating its musicians with love and care. 

My job as Hospitality Coordinator was mostly cooking for the bands and making sure they were taken care of. And no, I don't mean scoring them weed and dating them…because weed is ILLEGAL. But I digress. The point is, I'm better at cooking for a crowd. (I'm a Leo, the more praise I can get, the more likely it is that I'm gonna cook. Just how it is.) And while my husband knows that I'm only going to cook if he's SUPER complimentary, it just isn't the same…he has to praise me or he's gonna be stuck with bread sandwiches or pizza toast (his specialties. Ask me what a bread sandwich is. I bet you can't figure it out.)

But today, I freakin' cooked! And took a picture. (Mostly to show you the amazing Villeroy & Boch Acapulco bowl it's in.)

Hope this inspires you to make something delicious for dinner. Or just to praise me. Whatever works.
 
  

Gluten-Free-Vegan-Tex-Mex Pasta Salad!

Ingredients:

Your choice of pasta (I used a corn flour penne.)
1 bell pepper
1 tomato (I used a handful of baby toms)
1 can of black beans (or pinto, or kidney beans.)
2 cups spinach
1 avocado
s&p to taste

For dressing:

1/3 cup olive oil
juice from 2 limes
1 tsp. cumin (or just wing it.)
½ tsp minced garlic, or a tsp garlic powder
hot sauce of your choice
a pinch of raw sugar, if desired. (Honey would be nice if you’re not making a vegan dish)
s&p to taste


“Instructions” (Do whatever you want, I don’t care.)

I used corn flour pasta for this recipe, which I’d never had before. I thought it might be too corn-flavoured for a traditional Italian style dish, so I thought I’d try out something else with it first. (As it turns out, it’s not very corny –unlike myself- and could easily be used in any pasta dish.)

As I was boiling the water for the pasta, I filled a bowl with frozen corn kernels, (which is what I had on hand-fresh scraped would be excellent) an entire can of rinsed black beans, some sliced orange baby tomatoes and a red bell pepper. 

For the dressing I combined about 1/3 cup of olive oil with the juice of two small limes, a bit of finely minced garlic, pepper, sea salt, a couple of dashes of sriracha and about a teaspoon of cumin and a pinch of raw sugar. You could use honey, but I wanted to keep this meal vegan. If you didn’t want a vegan dish, some soft crumbled goat cheese or any Mexican cheese would be nice.  

When the pasta was cooked I left it to drain and threw the bean and veg mixture into the cooking pot on low. I wanted to let some of the natural sugars release from the veggies. Then I added half of the dressing, the pasta and some fresh spinach to the pot and let cook for a couple of minutes. (I like a slightly wilted spinach in pasta, but you may prefer to put it in after everything has cooled.) I refrigerated the whole shebang for an hour or so, then added salt and pepper to taste, a bit more dressing and added sliced avocado.

It was GOOD, y’all. And it took longer for me to write the instructions than it did to make the meal.



Provecho!

It's just not complete without my new Day of the Dead s&p shakers that J picked up for me in Austin