Love List Wednesday

Today is short, but sweet!

• Target

• The Hubs

Maybe I want this shirt, but in a different color

• Harvest scent Yankee Candles

• Soft Blankets
• Air Conditioning

Hope everyone is successfully muddling through their week!

Spicy Whole Wheat Spaghetti and Drunken Clams

It's been forever since I've blogged, so I thought my return recipe should be awesome. I tweaked this simple recipe from May's Real Simple for our 80's night celebration. You might wonder what 80's night is and why we're celebrating it. Well, we are counting down the days till WM's graduation and celebrating on the 10's nights. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, tonight is 66. I am such a slacker.

Enjoy this delicious, fancy, and EASY recipe!

Spicy Whole Wheat Spaghetti and Drunken Clams


Ingredients:
12 oz Whole wheat spaghetti
1/4 c Olive oil
3 tbsp Minced garlic
1 Chili pepper, thinly sliced
3/4 c. Dry white wine
20 Littleneck clams, scrubbed
Salt and Pepper
1/4 c. Chopped flat leaf parsley

Method:
Cook the pasta according to package directions. Reserve 1 cup of the cooking water and put pasta back in the pot.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a large pot or skillet over medium high heat. Add garlic and chili and cook, constantly stirring until mixture is fragrant. Add wine and cook for 1 minute. Add the clams, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/4 tsp black pepper and cook, covered until the clams open. This should take 6-8 minutes. Discard any clams that remain closed.

Mix the pasta and clam mixture, 1/2 cup of the reserved cooking water, and 1/4 tsp salt to the pasta and cook over medium heat, tossing gently, until the sauce is heated through. This should take 1-2 minutes. If the mixture seems dry, add more cooking water.

Serve sprinkled with parsley.


*******Some notes on clams*******
When picking your clams at the store, make sure all your clams are tightly closed. This means they are alive. That sounds terrible, but you need the clams alive when you go get them. If they are already open, they are bad and they will make you sick.


When you cook your clams they need to open. If they don't open it means the clam was bad/dead inside its shell without opening. 

Our celebration dinner -we had a wonderful bottle of Verdi with it

Delicious, Spicy Drunken Clams

Cold and lonely weather down south!

I can't believe it's already been so long since my last post! I know because today is the next Siesta verse posting day. If you're interested in Beth Moore's Bible Memory verse challenge, you can check it out here. My verse for today is Ephesians 3:20-21
"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen."
I love this verse because it always reminds me that when we are seeking God's will for our lives, he WILL deliver more than we can ask for or imagine. So amazing, so reassuring, and a little scary!

This last week, I was a little lonely as hubs went off to Naval Air Station Pensacola for Water Survival Training. He was really looking forward to it, but ended up not enjoying it as much as he had hoped. It wasn't because it was too difficult, but because the South had a terrible cold stretch last week. One of the days he was out on the ocean, the air temperature was on 35 degrees! That is chilly! I was very happy to drive up to San Antonio on Friday to pick WM up at the airport. Hopefully he'll have a start date for his 3rd phase of training sometime next week!

I wanted to welcome hubs home with an exciting and delicious meal. Since it was still pretty chilly in Corpus Christi (A note to all my CO friends and family. I know that my upper 30's and low 40's weather  is not cold in comparison to your cold. Unfortunately for me, my body has acclimated to warm weather after almost two years in Texas. With 8 months of the year in my border town in the 100's, you start to get chilly pretty easy...) I opted for a luxurious soup. I made Pumpkin, Cheddar, and Chipotle Soup. It was delicious! The recipe is from the Rachael Ray Website and can be found here. I used canned pumpkin for my soup since our local grocery stores are no longer carrying fresh pumpkins. It was perfect soup to help warm WM up!

Warm Soup on a Cold Day

For dessert, I made a decadent Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake. That recipe can be found here.

Who says no to this kind of chocolatey goodness?

My first Run for the Bling of It  run is this coming Saturday. It's a pretty informal 5k put on by the Corpus Christi Roadrunners. I'm pretty excited to be kicking this 12 month challenge off!

My running buddy Alli is rocking out running (like usual) and I am hanging on. Right now it looks like we're both on the way to getting our January presents (exciting!)!

One of the best new parts of Corpus Christi we've discovered is the farmer's market. It's every Saturday at 9 am in the morning. It's definitely small, but there is a ton of great produce. Hubs and I have decided to choose a random veggie every time we go and figure out how to use it when we get home. Today  we bought:

Kale and Cilantro

The cilantro is easy to use. It actually went into a soup tonight. The kale is its own challenge. We found a recipe for kale chips and a kale in pasta recipe. We're giving both a try this week. It's almost sad to eat such a pretty veggie.

Look at those pretty ruffles!

This is post is going on forever, so I think I'll wrap it up here!

Tomato Soup and No More Home Grown Pumpkins...

I've noticed I seem to start every post with some sentence about how long it's been since I've last posted. That's probably indicative of a bad habit. From now on, I'm going to try hard to post on a regular basis. My dear friend Allie over at her blog is a great example of how great  a blog is when someone actually blogs more than once a month. With Allie as my shining example, I am going to try to do better. Also, if you need great ideas about running or healthy eating, Allie's blog is the place to go. She is awesome!

Since we last met, I have done many things. The first very important thing was watching my awesome hubby solo. WM did such a fantastic job. It was amazing to get to be part of something so amazing!

WM in the T-6 Texan II for his solo!

Since the solo, pilot training has only gotten more exciting. WM has been doing lots of fun acrobatics in the T-6. The smile he comes home with after all of his exciting air stunts is worth all the not seeing each other and long hours. Then, after doing lots of fun flying, WM had his mid phase check ride. This was the first big check ride and a little never racking for our household. Thankfully, WM did fantastic! Post check ride was his area solo which put a smile on WM's face that lasted all weekend.

During all these exciting happenings, I took a 10 day vaca to visit an Aunt in Cali. It was a fun trip, but after so many days away from WM and Mack I was ready to return home. WM seemed to do okay while I was gone, but Mack was another story. Mack dug up our entire pumpkin patch in a fit of rage. He was in big trouble for a few days. I thought about posting a picture, but the dead pumpkins make me too sad. Since I returned, Mack's naughtiness has disappeared and life is back to normal.

To finish off this post, I am going to post an all time favorite recipe from an all time favorite cooking site
It is for Stewed Tomato Soup with Butter Croutons. I change this recipe up a little bit and use canned diced tomatoes. It is pretty much impossible to get red, not pink tomatoes at our local grocery store. I use 3 cans of the diced tomatoes with basil, oregano, and garlic and two cans of fire roasted diced tomatoes and follow the cooking instructions. It is delicious every time and we love it!

Also, from here out, I am going to begin photographing my food. It starts tonight with my recipe for Cheddar Chicken that is going to become Cheddar Turkey Filets with Mashed cauliflower/potatoes. Yum!