Monday Afternoon Beans

Well, with a name like that, this recipe has to be . . . mediocre? Hold your horses there! This is a quick and easy pasta dish that you'll be ever so glad to have on hand when you've got hardly any time to throw dinner together.

Monday Afternoon Beans

1 medium onion, minced

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 cans Northern beans, rinsed and drained

1 cup vegetable broth

1, 8 oz. jar pesto

8 oz. rotini pasta

Directions:

1. Cook pasta and drain.
2. While pasta cooks, pour the oil from the pesto jar (about 2 Tbsp.) into a saute pan and use it to saute onions and garlic until onions are transparent.
3. Add beans, vegetable broth, and pesto and heat through (about 5 minutes).
4. Add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Mix in pasta and serve with Parmesan cheese if desired.

Note: To those with a trained eye, you might notice that the pasta shown is penne pasta and the recipe calls for rotini pasta.

Let me just tell you, whenever you hear "lookin' for adventure in whatever comes our way," sure most people associate that with motorcycles and whatnot. But, I'm pretty sure Steppenwolf was talking about people like yours truly - people who will substitute a pasta in a recipe WITH NO APOLOGIES.

So, when you give this a try, if you happen to have a half of a box of another pasta already open. Remember that you, too, were born to be wild.

The Land of Oz

Well, we usually always get lost!--But sometimes you stumble across something magical. 

Not too long ago, in looking for free and cheap things for the fam to do, I came across Geocaching. This is a rather new past time cooked up with the invention of GPS devices.  It is like an electronic scavenger hunt where one person hides a goody box and then leaves clues so other people can find them with the help of longitude and latitude coordinates.

We were in Boone when we decided to give it a whirl.  I found this awesome one that referenced The Wizard of Oz.  Maybe it's my generation, but every year growing up, The Wizard of Oz came on TV, and every year I was securely planted in front of the TV for 2 1/2 hours.  

We drove up and down the mountain passing signs for Emerald Mountain, we knew we were close, but couldn't quite find this place, so we stopped at the only store for miles and the hubby goes up to the cashier and says, "I know this sounds crazy, but is there a yellow brick road around here somewheres?"  To our surprise (and my content) she just smiles and pulls out a map!

We stumbled across the Land of Oz right here in our back yard:

Why is there a yellow brick road in the mountains of North Carolina you may ask?  This was a theme park back in the 70s.  There was a balloon ride (above) made from a ski lift, Dorothy's crash-landed house, and even costumes from the movie were on display there at one time.  Today, there is an annual festival where costumed characters employed in the 70s reunite in this magical oasis.

We didn't find a geocache that day, but we made an awesome discovery:

"We suck at geocaching, but we're pretty good at scarfing down chips!"

Well Played, Baby!

Baby Emmers likes to leave a path of destruction in her wake.  She doodled today in the car.  (literally, with a sharpie on her baby hands)  We thought that was the extent of today's destruction.  It wasn't until we were on our way to gymnastics and it felt like a tire was going to come off, that I looked down and saw that the emergency brake was on.  After righting the brake, we set out once more to the soundtrack of Mamma Mia that had also magically appeared in the cd player:

"Gimme, gimme, gimme"  started playing, and right on cue, Emma Lola starts singing, "Gimme, gimme, gimme!" (and loving every minute of it, I'm sure.)  You see, we've been trying to teach her to say "Please" instead of "Gimme", and usually (eventually) she will very dramatically say Pah-lease.

Well played, Baby, well played.