Pasta e Fagoli

Here is the recipe for Pasta e Fagoli. It's supposed to be a copycat of the soup at Olive Garden, but I've never had it so I can't tell you how it compares. I just think this stuff is pretty good! It makes quite a bit so either have it for guests or freeze. :-)

Pasta e Fagoli (makes about 6 quarts)

1 lb. ground beef
1 small onion, diced
1/2 of a small
1 lb. bag of baby carrots, chopped
5 stalks of celery, diced
2 (14.5 oz.) cans of diced tomatoes
1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can white beans, drained and rinsed
1 (32 oz.) carton + 1 (14.5 oz.) can of beef broth (If you like a more brothy soup add more, I made up about 50 oz of broth.)
1 1/2 tsp oregano1
1/4 tsp pepper
2 1/2 tsp fresh parsley, chopped (I used dry)
3/4 tsp tabasco sauce
1 jar (1 lb. 10 oz.) spaghetti sauce
1 cup dry small pasta (such as ditalini or elbow macaroni)
salt to taste


Brown ground beef. Drain if necessary. Add onion, carrot, celery and diced tomatoes. Simmer 10 minutes. Add beans, beef broth, oregano, pepper, parsley, tabasco sauce and spaghetti sauce.Simmer soup on low for about 30-45 minutes until carrots are almost tender.Add pasta to pot and simmer on low for about 15-30 minutes until pasta is just shy of al dente. As the soup cools, the pasta will absorb the broth. You can cook the pasta separate and add it to the soup after the soup has cooled.

(I browned the meat, pureed the onion and celery and added everything but the noodles and put it in a crockpot. Added the noodles to the crockpot about an hour before eating.)

How many people does it take......?

We like to try to buy our happiness...

so we bought a new microwave stand for our kitchen.

Ken, Nick, and Jesse were all over at our place so we put them to work.

I had to MAKE them read the directions. (I'm kidding, sort of....)

Nicks job. :-) Aidan is trying to figure out his phone.

Ken took over the job of containing Aidan.

It's almost done.

Aidan had to make the final inspection.

He approves.

Potluck!

The weekends that we actually stay in SLC, we go to the House of Aaron fellowship that meets on Saturday morning. Normally there are around 10 of us on a good day, but this weekend we had guest speakers, so it brought a bigger than normal crowd.

AND, we had guests staying at our place and they came too. (Yes, Sharon and Kenneth are guests now.) :-)

All in all, we had about 30 people for the meeting..

Jerald & Margo, and Jon and Mary came to tell us about their experience in Israel.

Here is "little" Sam...

He's not looking so little anymore. The kid is almost as big as Aidan. I realize Aidan is a little squirt, but Sam is a big, cute, chubby kid.


This is TROUBLE.

Just eating their crackers.

We had a little lunch potluck after the meeting.

I made and brought Pasta e Fagoli soup (you know, like at Olive Garden) It was really GOOD!

Not cause I'm a good cook or anything, I just happened to find a really good recipe.

I'll post it later for all to enjoy. :-)

Dilemma...

So I need a new swing for this next baby, and I've been looking at this one,



Or this one... to me either would work for a boy or girl.

Well, tonight we're at the store and we see this one on sale in the clearance section for a really good deal, AND it has the added bonus of being able to plug in or use batteries. (although that's not really that big of a deal for me.)

So we get home, and later I decide that I'm going to open the box and make sure everything looks okay since it was in the clearance section.....the swing looks blue in the picture, right?

Well, I open it up and it's PURPLE!

So my dilemma is this, if I have a boy, I can't in good conscience put him in a purple swing, can I?

La di da di

Sorry, all my posts of late have been about Aidan... That's because our van has been in the shop until today so we've been housebound and so I don't have anything else to do. (AND I think he's kind of cute) :-) He is feeling "better" but he's still whiny enough that I do a countdown for the last 3 hours before Cary gets home.

So we take some pictures to kill time, although lately it turns to him chasing me trying to get to the camera.

Like here. So I distract him by pulling out the vacuum, which he loves, to distract him.


Shortly after this picture he turned the vacuum on and scared himself to pieces.

I'm not sure why it's scary when he turns it on, but when I turn it on, he's chasing me and the vacuum all over the house.

This is his "Mom, I'm bored! Lets go outside and plaaaaaay."


Boys and their toys.

Side note: Thanks to Aunt Janille he has lots of cute clothes and shoes.

Ugh.

So Aidan's not been himself the past few days, but I've been attributing it to the fact that he has 3 teeth coming in. He's been sleeping in until 10:00 the last two days and that's VERY unusual, as well as being cranky and clingy. Fast forward to tonight when trying to feed him supper and he wouldn't eat anything, also very unusual... so Cary picks him up to rock him and see if he'd go to sleep. Aidan proceeds to throw up all over Cary and all over the floor behind them. Cary was a little shocked and Aidan was scared, I think, and he just sat there and cried. Ugh. So this a first for us and I'm hoping this isn't what we're going to be dealing with all night and tomorrow.... I'm also scared that it's not a matter of IF we get the stomach bug too, but WHEN.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

17 Months Old...

I can't believe my baby is almost a year and half old.

As I've said....he's a little busier nowadays.

I have a storage ottoman in the living room for some of his toys

He decided he didn't want to pull all the toys out this time...

He wanted to get in there with them!