Pasta With Vegetables

Hey everyone...sorry about leaving you all in the lurch like that (is that the right phrase?) back in February but time just got away from me. I'll try to blog in the evenings now instead of the afternoons so David is available to watch the baby. In general, I do think we are adjusting well to being parents and basically on call 24/7 but sometimes nights are still hard. There have been a few times where she has slept 6 hours between feedings (but that 6 hours usually starts before we go to bed so we usually only get 3-4 hours of that 6 hours for sleep). We have even found time to do laundry, cleaning, and start cooking again!

Speaking of cooking, we recently made this recipe. It's absolutely amazing! We did make a couple modifications to match what we had on hand. So here is "our" recipe.

• jar of canned tomatoes from David's grandma's garden (I would guess it was still close to 3 cups), with juice
• 1/2 bag spinach
• 1/2 container of baby bella mushrooms
• 1/3 yellow onion
• dash of red pepper flakes
• about 2 tablespoons of garlic
• salt, to taste
• 16 oz box of rotini noodles
• 2 cups pizza cheese (we wanted mozzarella but we didn't have any)

Then we cooked the pasta to the box's specifications for al dente. When there was about 5 minutes left, we threw all the vegetables into a skillet (no oil) on high heat. When they cooked down some (enough to make room for more stuff---the pan was heaping with spinach), we added the spices.  We cooked until the noodles the noodles were done and then added the cheese and heated until the cheese melted and mixed in. Next time, I would do something different with the cheese because it basically just stuck to my plate (under all the noodles and stuff) and didn't add much flavoring (since I didn't really get to eat it). We did serve the noodles and the vegetables separate, which I think worked out better than mixing it all in.

I will also mention that this is GREAT leftover. The thing I liked most about this recipe was that it used up a bunch of stuff that was about to go bad. I love recipes that do that!

I would definitely make this again but like I said, the cheese needs a new direction. I'm just not sure what that is yet. I would also think that this recipe is versatile enough that you could use whatever veggies you wanted. If you wanted to make it vegan, you could easily leave out the cheese too. We just included it for extra protein.