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Kerry Jo and I made this for dinner the other night. T’was quite delish. It is a slightly modified version of a recipe I found on KeyIngredient.com I used different chicken, regular penne instead of mini penne, and artichokes instead of olives.

Oh and I stole this photo from another blog that was posting the same recipe that was also modified. Mine looked better.

Ingredients

8 ounces penne pasta
1 jar (16-ounce) Alfredo sauce
1 can (14.5-ounce) diced tomatoes with basil, garlic, and oregano
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 package, (12 ounces) HEB fully cooked pre-seasoned chicken breast fajita strips.
1 can artichoke bottoms,
Shredded Parmesan cheese

Directions

1. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta according to package directions. Drain well; return to hot pot. Cover; keep warm.

2. Meanwhile, reheat chicken strips in microwave according to package instructions, and chop artichoke bottoms into bite sized pieces.

3. In a medium saucepan, combine Alfredo sauce, tomatoes, Italian seasoning, and red pepper flakes over medium heat. Stir in chicken and Artichokes. Bring to a simmer; cook for 10 minutes.

4. Serve hot over cooked pasta. Top with Parmesan cheese.

• The company I work for hasn't been paying any of their bills, for parts, +diesel,Just checked my bank, looks like they're not paying me now. #
• Ever climb out of your nice warm bed and put on a pair of 32* pants? This guy did. Now, that's brisk! #

• Talked to the insurance company yesterday about my stolen motorcycle. They said that I am gonna have to pay the $1000 deductible. Sucks. #

• Going to take a 1 week break from Twitter and facebook. Feel free to call me, txt me, or email me. #
• Gonna be really tired in three hours and fifteen minutes when it's time to wake up and go to work. #
• At a new bar across the hwy from opal's marina, called Weirdos. Having a drink with Jeremy. #
• Woke up with a killer headache. Must. Find. Coffee. #
• Girlfriend is meeting my bro and sis-in-law tonight. Dinner at Houston's. Sure they will love her. #

• Georgetown HS vs Mcneil HS. Watching the JV basketball game with KJ. Let's go GHS! #
• About to eat some delicious macaroni grill with my beautiful, mortorcycle riding, gun shooting, girlfriend. #
• Gonna go out to my land today to do some shooting with my awesome girlfriend. Gonna shoot .22, 9mm, .45, .223, and 12 gauge. #

I made some delicious food tonight, and I want to share it because it took a lot of will power to not eat it all, and I have never seen anybody else make it before.

This is good if you like pasta but are trying to cut back on the carbs. I actually like it better than the pasta.

Pasta: 41 grams of carbohydrates per serving

Tofu: 3 grams of carbohydrates per serving

Italian Tofu (think pasta without the pasta)

Ingedients:

One block firm tofu

3 tablespoons of olive oil

1/2  medium yellow onion

1 clove of garlic

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of pepper

About 12 ounces of marina sauce

Small palmful of fresh basil

1/4 cup of red wine of your choice.

Prep:

Slice tofu into half inch cubes. Dice onions into half inch squares. Press garlic. Loosely Chop basil Leaves

Cook:

Add oil to pan and put on medium heat. When oil is to temperature add pressed garlic and brown.  Then add onions and cook until the outside layer of the onions starts to get translucent.  Next, add salt, pepper, and wine. Cook about 2 minutes.  Add tofu and cook for a few more minutes. Add marinara sauce and chopped basil and simmer for a few minutes. Serve and Enjoy!

Note: The tofu does not really have to “cook.” It can be eaten raw. While cooking it with the garlic, onions, spices and wine you just want to heat it up and absorb some of the flavor.

Serves 2-3

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Ellie and Amanda, Boys can blog recipes too!

I have had some people asking me about my blog.  So here goes…

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and there have been some pretty cool things going on in my life since the last post. I’ll try to give you the readers digest version.  I came to the conclusion a couple of months ago that I am in fact an adult now. Please hold your applause till the end… And that I was still living like a teenager. So I decided that some things were definitely going to have to change.
~~ I quit smoking about 7 weeks ago now.

~~ I moved to a nice little one bedroom apartment in Round Rock, that’s close to work and close to Jeremy’s house. The coolest thing about moving though is that I got rid of about half of all my stuff and now everything has a place where it belongs and I am keeping my place clean and uncluttered.

~~ I was tired of feeling unhealthy and tired all the time and I have started to eat healthier, drink more water, drink less alcohol, and exercise. Now I need to start going to bed on-time and get more sleep.

~~ My old church was a really large church and there weren’t very many people my age there. I felt pretty lost in the sea of people, and nobody would notice if I was there or not. Most of the time I was not.  I’ve started going to a new church that is smaller and has more people my age. I’m getting connected with some really cool people that are really following Jesus and it is very encouraging.

~~ I have also just started reading a really cool book called Soul Revolution. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. It is written by John Burke, who founded Gateway Church in Austin. The idea behind the book is ” What would happen if you made a conscious effort to connect with God at least once every hour for sixty days”? With a goal of really connecting with God in real conversation continuously throughout the day instead of having some memorized prayer that you say x number of times a day at certain times. It’s called the 60/60 challenge. I will probably be blogging more about the 60/60 challenge in the near future.

So that is my life in a nutshell right now…

Oh yeah, and I typed this whole blog post on my iPhone while driving about 3 mph and watering grass.

I know that the last few post have been OLD news.  Me talking about my childhood.  Have no fear I’m about to do it again.

The Old Fair Oaks Bridge

As a kid I was deathly afraid of heights.  It made me dizzy to look out the second floor window at the ground. So I decided that in order to get over my fear I would have to face it. The picture above is a picture of the old Fair Oaks Bridge in Sacramento, California. I went out there quite often to go swimming in the American River. I would see people jumping off the bridge and it looked like they were having fun.  We went out there one day when I was 10 or 11 years old and my dad and his friend were going to jump off the bridge.  There is a six foot high chain link fence that runs along both sides of the bridge. I watched my dad and his friend both climb over and jump. It didn’t look so bad from the safe side of the fence.  It was my turn to jump. I climbed up one side of the fence and as I was about to put my leg over to the other side I looked down and it looked like it was suddenly twice as high now that I wasn’t looking down “through” the fence but over it.   I sucked it up and continued over. Then I was standing on the other side with my back to the fence looking down and holding on for dear life.  I don’t know how long I stood there but it felt like it was at least 20 minutes. There were boats going by and people standing on the banks of the river, and people walking by on the bridge who stopped to watch. Everybody was saying “JUMP!”  They were really loud at first, then they faded out like somebody reached out and turned the volume knob down. I was hyper focused on the three square feet of water where I figured I would land and everything else went blurry. I was worried that as soon as I jumped a boat would come under me and I would hit the deck. Then a mother duck with her ducklings started swimming right next to the spot where I would land. I thought about the look of surprise on the duck’s face and I was in the air, falling, spinning my arms trying to stay upright. then everything went black. I came to just as my head went under the water, and I was about 15 feet under the water before I started making my way back up. I broke though the surface and swam ashore. The bottoms of my feet hurt like heck where they slapped  the water, but I felt great! I Did It! and I vowed never to do it again.

I can’t say that that day cured my fear of heights completely, but ever since it has been a more rational fear. Now I love to go up to high places, just as long as I’m on the safe side of the fence.

Me in my hometown of Honolulu

When I was young I had an advantage.  I knew that I knew very little about the world. Because of that, I was constantly astonished by things that were true, and the strange theories I came up with about how the world worked didn’t seem so far fetched to me.  I had an imaginati0n, and all things seemed possible.  The older I get and the more I think I know exactly how the world works, the less creative I am.  If I try to draw a house now, I try to make it look realistic as possible.  As a kid I might have drawn a brontosauras with wings, a front door and a chimney and called it a house.

When I was a kid I was constantly growing out of my shoes, but I didn’t know that. Nobody said that my feet were too big for my shoes.  They would always say that my shoes were too small for my feet.  So, for a short time I thought my shoes kept shrinking.

I thought that I could jump off the roof with an umbrella over my head and slowly float down.  The umbrella turned inside-out and I kneed myself in the chin.

For a while I thought that I really did have quarters in my ears and couldn’t figure out why only adults could find them.

I would get dressed to watch TV because I didn’t want Mr. Rogers to see me in my underwear.

I once stood in front of the mirror and closed my eyes to see what I looked like when I was sleeping.

I thought that hiking boots and mountain bikes would give you a super ability to scale steep inclines.

I used to call an octopus’ tentacles “testicles”

I thought that I had red and blue blood and wondered why I only ever saw the red kind.

Whenever I found an old bottle or jar I would rub it on the odd chance that a genie would pop out and grant me my three wishes. I would wish for the ability to fly, the ability to be invisible and make other things invisible, and that my crush since I was two and a half years old “Sita”would love me back.

What did you believe as a kid?  What theories did you have and what caused them?