Spaghetti with grilled summer vegetables, chanterelles and hickory nuts, page 180-181

I've been looking forward to making this recipe for some time. I love mushrooms and Bernadette has taught me to love nuts in pasta, so this recipe seems like it's going to be right up my alley. The recipe calls for lots of summer veggies: peppers, onions, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, etc. so we bought a nice basket full at the farmer's market Saturday. It's nice to have a purpose at the farmer's market.

I hope this recipe lives up to my expectations tonight. We'll see.

Well, that was good. The veggies are all grilled outside, mushrooms and garlic sauteed, and the pasta mixed with all that plus nuts, parmesan cheese and herbs. I used some of the chanterelles from Portland and supplemented them with oyster and button mushrooms from the store. I want to keep the remaining chanterelles I have for the next two recipes.

So, today my family ate entirely vegetarian: muffins and fruit for breakfast, grilled peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and this pasta for dinner. Henry sometimes panics about making sure can can have meat. The boy loves his protein. He thinks he could never make it as a vegetarian. I reminded him, after his third large helping of this yummy and satisfying pasta, that he's gone all day without meat and hadn't even noticed. It's good to know you can mix things up and enjoy a variety of kinds of foods, I think.

Henry has a classmate who is diabetic and also has celiac disease, (which means he should not eat gluten). With such a restricted diet, wouldn't it be nice if the child liked a wide variety of foods? It would be so much easier to safisfy your cravings and stay healthy on a restricted diet if you had a wide palatte of foods you cared for. I feel so sorry for kids and their families when a child is faced with a dietary restriction, yet only likes a limited variety of food, like pizza and chicken strips. It looks really hard to keep them happy and healthy.

So, eat up kiddos. It's mushroom and veggie pasta tonight and chanterelle and proscuitto pizza tomorrow. Get used to it.