Herbed Spinach Pasta Salad

Today, I bought a new ‘spice rack’.  There’s been a big agricultural fair at City Hall plaza, near my new house, these past few days, and I keep prowling past all the herbs and plant pots for sale with wishful eyes.  This one, though, was a winner.  It doesn’t take up much horizontal space, it’s stable on its base (for a minimum of cat-related damages), and it’s terribly easy to angle around each segment as needed.  I grabbed the stand, then promptly bought basil, rosemary, and golden lemon thyme to occupy it in my sunny window.  I figure the plants are a lot cheaper than buying the fresh herbs at the grocery store, only to have half of them spoil before I can use them due to getting too cold or too wet or too dry in the fridge or on the way home.  My fridge, by the way, is a beast at freezing things. I haven’t yet quite figured out how to turn the thermostat in there up a bit so it stops icing my water and destroying my green produce.

Anyway, with all these fresh herbs on hand, I decided it was time to make one of my old standby recipes again, a super easy pasta salad.

Chickpea Falafel

It’s been an eventful few days!  Yesterday alone, my cable internet quit working, my computer was threatening issues with the motherboard, and my phone seemed determined to thwart me at every turn.  Whatever ill-fated star was passing over the realm of electronics yesterday, however, seems to have gone on its way today.  I’m hoping.  Anyway, I’m back, and I’ve even found the time to share a new recipe.  (Though I’ve also discovered that if I continue to cook at the rate I started, I rapidly overreach the limited confines of my fridge and freezer.  The woes of cooking for one person.)

At any rate, I’ve been on a quest for foods that can be made in batches and prepared in advance for use in lunches or dinners during the week, when I have less spare time and a diet to keep in mind.  I’ve been craving falafel for a couple of weeks, and only whetted my appetite when I ate some last weekend, so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and experiment with recipes until I found something that worked.  My chickpeas were soaking, of course, when the internet and then my computer decided to take a vacation, leaving me with a lot of free time, a few sketchily-remembered details from the recipes I’d glanced at, and a heap of frustration.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It Chana Masala

If you want to know how about 90% of my meal planning goes, here’s the answer:

“What do I have in my fridge right now?”