Adventures in Whole Foods Cooking: Recipe 1

In a cookbook without pictures you can't select
recipes based on how the "kitchen lab-produced" dish looks.
For the past few weeks months I have stop-started refining my limited cooking skills. Nearly two weeks ago, my wife suggested I buy a whole foods cookbook and begin working through those recipes because they should be 1) healthy and 2) most importantly, relatively easy. Though it seemed a cliched idea, I thought it might be fun to work through an entire cookbook, maybe doing some with my son(s) or wife. First, however, I wanted to go solo.

I've had afresh purchased copy of The Whole Foods Market® Cookbook: A Guide to Natural Foods with 350 Recipes waiting on my shelves waiting for the day to begin attempting to work some culinary magic and with zero "kid activities" scheduled for this evening, I set about putting together a dish for our dinner.

I first settled on three potential pasta dishes (anyone can boil water, right?) and scanned the pantry for what ingredients we might be lacking. Fortunately, I have many bottle to return, so I made a list of ingredients and went to the supermarket to "kill" two birds with one stone. I figured that f I identified the most "exotic" key ingredients for each potential meal, the one I found first would be the guinea pig dish.

First up, from "Pasta and Other Warming Starches," Spelt Penne with Peas and Walnuts:


Due to the absence of some of the more "exotic" ingredients (spelt?)at my local megalo-mart, some substitutions were made, such as kashi standing in for spelt.

I also added some green beans to the peas. Anne had recently "harvested" a large bowl from the garden, so I improvised.

Mmmmm... toasted walnuts! Though I was unsure how others (and myself) would like nuts in our pasta, it went over surprisingly well.

Here is everything all put together in our electric frying pan (doing its best large saute pan impersonation).
The final result (pictured at the top of the post, was very well received by my wife and son. Some of us added Parmesan cheese once it was plated, and there was plenty (intended to serve 6) left over for lunches tomorrow.

Only 349 more recipes to go!