If I wanted rice, I would have made stir-fry

There are days when you get home from work, peel your six-inch heels off your swollen feet, and try to think of ways to use the fourteen open bags of frozen vegetables in your freezer. But it's hot, so pasta salad sounds good -- and includes the word salad. Check "healthy eating" off today's to-dos.

Ha! Slightly more difficult with celiac. Fortunately, there are a number of brands of rice and corn pasta, and some of them even taste sort of like pasta (instead of like, well, rice and corn). Some of them even cook like pasta.

Not tonight's. Tonight, we made de Boles spiral pasta. Why? Well, to go with my open, half-used bags of frozen vegetables, I have a series of open, half-used boxes of pasta. I grabbed one that we purchased during early days of celiac, when anything that looked familiar felt good.

Rice pasta's tricky. The instructions say to simmer for five to seven minutes, and I already know from experience that an additional second in the pot causes most rice pastas to disintegrate into pieces of starch that look a little like rice and a little like maggots. But I am a woman worth her salt in the kitchen, so I actually set the timer. Grabbed it at exactly seven minutes.

It disintegrated anyway. Now I remember why we buy other brands. Pieces were so small that I actually thought about calling it rice salad by the time I stirred it gently into vegetables and dressing (balsamic vinegar -- don't trust commercially-produced salad dressings unless they're Newman's, say, "gluten-free" and cost three times as much as gluten-full dressing).

So, de Boles: one bag of rice flour for effort.