Recipe - Pasta Samball

Pasta Samball (Serves four)

I had the urge to have some Samball Olek last evening. It turned out so good I decided to share the recipe. It's quick, easy, and tasty and nowhere near as spicy as you might think from the amount of Samball in it.

I was out of tomato sauce and since I already had items cooking on the stove I could not go back to the store, so I substituted Heinz low carb ketchup, and the dish was awesome!

Once again, I must stress that the Conimex Samball is by far the best! If you can't get it locally you can order it online here. In my humble opinion, you have NOT had Samball Olek if you have not had this brand.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound Dreamfield Rotini Pasta
3/4 pound 92% Lean ground beef
1 large yellow onion, sliced thinly
1/2 pound sliced fresh mushrooms
1/2 cup Conimex Samball Olek
1/2 cup Heinz low carb ketchup
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, torn or chopped
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Freshly grated Romano cheese to taste
PAM Olive Oil Spray

Preparation:
Put on water for pasta and spray a large frying pan with PAM and place over medium flame. Add sliced onions and garlic. Cook until unions just translucent, stirring often.

Add pasta to water and cook to package directions while following rest of recipe. Drain pasta and return to covered pot after spraying the bottom of the pot with olive oil PAM.

Add mushrooms and basil to frying pan and cover. Let cook for five minutes, stirring once or twice. Add Samball and ground beef, cover and cook for five minutes, stirring once midway through and making sure ground beef is broken into small pieces as cooking proceeds.

Season with with freshly ground black pepper to taste and add low carb ketchup; stir to heat through. Turn off heat and stir in pasta, cover, and leave sit for 5 minutes.

Before serving sprinkle top with freshly grated Romano cheese.

Not too many posts

Its been a bit over two weeks since the last post; much going on, lots of stuff related to work I won't go into here (other than to say I still do not know if I will have a job down the road). Morale at work is somewhat lacking these days.

The X had surgery on October 17th which had some complications, I had the kids through the 28th, 12 days with the kids is always great! X is doing better, but, having trouble recovering; she just won't take it easy as the doctors tell her to.

My Dad is doing somewhat better, still has some post-operative pain but overall he has much less pain that he had prior to surgery and has left the house!

I have been having fun hacking my iPod touch and installing all kinds of software on it. So far I have rendered unbootable twice. Now I have a backup and restore procure which lets me recover all of my applications and data after restoring it to factory settings and re-hacking it. This saves me tons of time over the previous method which was install applications one by one, redo all settings, etc.

Danielle had her Halloween dance and party at the school Friday night; she and Scott are both looking forward to Halloween on Wednesday.

My brother's wife's father passed away last week; he was old and they had to amputate one of his legs to try and save him, but, he did not make it. Couple this with a new job (that has a long commute!) and trying to sell their house, and she really has her hands full. I wish I was closer so I could help out.

Chris got a part time job at Meijer; he will be challenged to come up with suitable finances though and it looks like a student loan will be in order. I gave his mom some extra cash to help offset him living at her house since he has been unable to pay the rent that was agreed on.

Tails continues to grow and to be cute, she really enjoyed having the kids around for the extra time; after they left yesterday she became my shadow, either napping on me or next to me on the couch. She does not realize it, so, please do not e-mail her at tailskitty@gmail.com and tell her, she will be getting spayed and laser-declawed sometime over the next few weeks.

Not much more to tell really, though I will try to post a bit more often.

Tails Tales on a Saturday Morning

Saturday morning; I dislike weekends when I do not have the kids. Having them half the time every week is certainly fun, but, I find myself wanting them everyday! Is that so unnatural, a parent wanting their kids full time?

So, I am a bit broody and distracted, but, Tails is doing her best to keep me amused! Racing around like a Tasmanian Devil, carrying objects in her mouth, bouncing off walls! This has been going on for more than an hour since I woke up.

Uh-oh! She may be winding down, she is padding over this way! She just jumped on my chest purring (this is her way of saying "I command you to stop whatever it is you think is more important than me and pet me and scratch me under my chin for at least 20 minutes straight so I can fall asleep against your face!"),

Pheewwww! She smells like fresh cat crap! Heavily of fresh cat crap! She obviously just came from her box, so, not wanting to seemingly reject her when she came looking for attention I tossed a bottle cap and she is now merrily chasing that around the house! It will be a little awhile before she calms down as she seems fully energized again.

As it is 44 degrees out this AM and thus too cold for a walk (I hate bundling up for a walk!!) it will soon be time for the morning ritual on the e-bike, and the decision should I listen to music while I pedal, watch TV, read, or a combination of the above?

Below is a recent picture of Tails for your enjoyment! You may of course click on it to open a much larger version in a new window.

Take a picture, It'll last longer.....

Yea, it'll last longer, maybe too long in fact!!

After getting my iPod Touch I decided I was going to put all my digital pictures on it. This took a weekend and much CPU time, plus I had to start over as the drive the images are on ran out of space as iTunes was converting them.

After getting them on the iPod and viewing some of them I was reminded of an issue that has been growing since 1999. This is when I got my first Digital camera, a Kodak DC210 courtesy of my friend David, and began taking pictures.

This issue is simply that I have too many pictures! Those of you with digital cameras know how it is; since there is no film to deal with or associated developing costs, you just tend to take many more pictures than you would with a film-based camera.

So, the weekend before last I began the laborious task of going through over 12,000 images. There were instances where, to get a good shot, I had taken multiples, anywhere from 1 or two, to 15 at the burst rate of whatever camera I had. Do I really need more than one image or a given shot? In almost every case, the answer was "No!", but, going through the multiple images and choosing the one to keep is very time consuming.

There were also a lot of blurred images so there were deleted. Poorly kit or bad contrast images? Ones that could not be tweaked, candidates for deletion, and this too was a time consuming process. How about pictures with no family members, but kids that even my kids do not remember? Gone!

Series of shots of kids soccer games? Greatly reduced by eliminating pictures where my kids were occluded behind another player, or by using the rules above for multiple shots of a given scene.

Then there were a number of shots in the "What the heck was I thinking category!" when I took them!

All this takes time, and this last weekend, other than caring for the kids and spending some time with them when they were not playing, I did nothing but work on whittling this down.

It was also quite sad in some cases as I went through several years of pictures when the X and I were married. I have been quite blue with this all week in fact. On the plus side, I have seen many pictures of the kids growing and cavorting around that I had forgotten! I've also got the idea to make some themed slide shows from recurring subject matter over the years.

I hope to be completed with this painful task this week, and I will post a recap of number of pictures and storage requirements before and after the great purge of 2007!

Going forward I will be doing this cleaning process as I offload the memory card, and I wonder why I just did not do this from the get-go!

Monkey Dance

I saw this video the other day and it cracked me up. Click the Play icon in the video below to watch. Suitable for all ages.

Healthy Carbonara Style Spaghetti

It has been quite awhile since I have posted a recipe, so here is one. I was craving Spaghetti Carbonara the other evening and that does not fit into my dietary guildines. Note I was craving the Traditional Italian version not the Americanized one that uses milk or cream as part of the process. I may do one of those at a later date, we shall see!

Ingredients

8 slices Louis Rich Turkey Bacon diced into small pieces

2 teaspoons olive oil or PAM-type olive oil Spray

4 ounces Dreamfield's Spaghetti

1/3 cup Egg Beaters

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/3 cup grated Romano cheese

1/2 teaspoon Freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon sea salt

Preparation:

Put on pasta water to boil and add salt. Cook to your preference (about 10 minutes to al dente, which is how I like it).

Once pasta is added to water above, heat 1 teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add diced turkey bacon and cook until crisp. Stir frequently. Cover frying pan and remove from heat.

Save some of the pasta water (about a half cup should do it) and then drain the pasta and return to pan. Add 1 teaspoon of olive oil to the empty pasta pot and heat over medium heat.

Add pasta back to pot, turn off heat and add turkey bacon and any drippings, Egg Beaters, pepper and cheeses. Stir well letting the heat of the ingredients cook the Egg Beaters. If the mixture is not creamy enough slowly stir in some of the hot pasta water you saved until it is the consistency you like. Place lid back on pot and allow to sit for one minute. Toss and serve with additional greated cheese of your choice.

Serves two

Healthy Carbonara Style Spaghetti with Peas and Mushrooms

Here's a slight variation on the traditional version of the recipe above, this one with peas and mushrooms.

Ingredients
8 slices Louis Rich Turkey Bacon diced into small pieces
3 teaspoons olive oil or PAM-type olive oil Spray
Four Ounces Dreamfield's Spaghetti
3 teaspoons minced garlic
8 ounces sliced fresh mushrooms
3/4 cup frozen peas, rinsed in cold water and drained
1/3 cup Egg Beaters
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup grated Romano cheese
1/2 teaspoon Freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon sea salt

Preparation:
Heat 1 teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add diced turkey bacon and cook until crisp. Stir frequently. Pour into small bowl and cover.

Put on pasta water to boil and add salt. Cook to your preference (about 10 minutes to al dente, which is how I like it).

While pasta is cooking add another teaspoon of olive oil and the chopped garlic to the frying pan. Saute until garlic just starts to brown and then add mushrooms. Cook, stirring every minute, for five minutes until mushrooms are cooked and light brown. Add peas and heat for an additional minute. Cover frying pan and remove from heat.

Save some of the pasta water (about a half cup should do it) and then drain the pasta and return to pan. Add 1 teaspoon of olive oil to the empty pasta pot and heat over medium heat.

Add pasta back to pot, turn off heat and add turkey bacon and any drippings, Egg Beaters, pepper, mushroom and pea mixture, and cheeses. Stir well letting the heat of the ingredients cook the Egg Beaters. If the mixture is not creamy enough slowly stir in some of the hot pasta water you saved until it is the consistency you like. Place lid back on pot and allow to sit for one minute. Toss and serve with additional grated cheese of your choice.

Serves two