  Totally vegetarian penne pasta Take 4 oz. uncooked pasta, put it in a bowl. Take a big ol' pot, fill it with enough water that the pasta will be submerged and can swim around nicely in a big boil, and set it on your stove. Turn that burner on high, and salt the water a tiny bit. Grab a couple portabella mushroom caps, about a cup and a half of water or vegetable broth, and a splash (two tablespoons or so) of red cooking wine, and set it on a brisk simmer on another burner. Crush some garlic - perhaps as much as a 1/3 of a bulb, put it in with the liquid the mushrooms are cooking in.
Water should be at a boil in the pot, so dump in the pasta. I used a whole wheat pasta, and even though it said 10 minutes, I am not much of an al dente girl, so I went for 15. The portabella should be nice and cooked by now, so go ahead and transfer the liquid and the shrooms to the canister that should have been packaged with your stick blender.
Blend the mushrooms and the garlic and the broth and the wine together, until you get this weird-looking sort of pesto goop out of it. Drain the pasta, and put half of it into a shallow bowl. Dump half of your pesto stuff in it. For added substance and protein, take a Boca smoked sausage (fake meat! mmm. ), nuke it, or fry it up according to the packaging, then chop half of it into small pieces and throw that in with your dish. Pack up the other half of everything and stick it in a container to bring to work tomorrow. 
