Delicious Spinach and Artichoke Stuffed Shells

I found this Spinach and Artichoke Stuffed Shells on Pink Basil Blog.  I can hardly wait to make this again, we LOVED it. I made my own marinara sauce. It almost seemed sinful that this was so easy and so delicious. I'm weaning myself off meat. Even though I do not eat much meat, only two - three times a week, but the more research I do on my disease, the more convinced I am that I do not need or want to eat meat any longer. I will continue to eat fish every now and then. And if I have company I will cook meat, but for myself on a day to day basis I'm giving it up.

My marinara sauce is so simple, saute some chopped onion in olive oil, add 2 -3 garlic cloves, minced, a couple cans tomatoes, Italian seasoning, dried basil, couple bay leaves, fennel seed. cook it down to the consistency you like. I then use my hand blender to puree it. You can used crushed tomatoes, doesn't really matter.

I followed the recipe exactly, except added more fennel seed to the filling, we like fennel.

So easy! So Delicious!

Recipe here.

People we haven't met...yet

I often think about things too complex and impossible to ever figure out - like how different I might be had I been raised by different parents, gone to different schools, grown up in a different country...so on and so on. It is my belief that people are shaped as much by the environment they grow up in and the people they grow up with, every bit as much as their DNA is responsible for who they are.

People are so impressionable - kind of like marshmallows, or, maybe a cake that needs just a few more minutes in the oven before completely done and when you press your finger in the center, it leaves an impression in the center that doesn't bounce back. We're all a little bit of lots of different people, places, and teachings.

Maybe we are shaped a little by the people we haven't met, the ones we create.

Photo: SPBM

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet. Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become.

We are not at home in the world because we imagined it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can’t describe it. We think of the world as the place of beginnings and ends, and we forget the inbetween, and even how to inhabit our own bodies. And then in adulthood, we sit and wonder why we feel so lost.” — Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

Friday Night Music - The Civil Wars

I LOVE everything about this couple - their voices, their looks, the chemistry between them. They sound and look like poetry in motion. I'll marry this guy in my next life. I'm sure of it! LOL Heck, I may even be her in my next life. :)

Enjoy








 “I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.”  --Simon Van Booy 

Tuesday Thoughts

Rescued this beauty yesterday from the dumpster. Hope I can keep her alive - not a lot of good light in my house. Can only try.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! ~John Muir

“Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.

It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:

The history of how you felt.”

― Simon Van Booy

Some favorite reads.

“For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.”

― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves.”

― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Dreamers conquered the world long ago.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

"The human heart is like india-rubber; a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it. If "little more than nothing will disturb it, little less than all things will suffice" to break it. As in the outer members of our frame, there is a vital power inherent in itself that strengthens it against external violence. Every blow that shakes it will serve to harden it against a future stroke; as constant labour thickens the skin of the hand, and strengthens its muscles instead of wasting them away: so that a day of arduous toil, that might excoriate a lady's palm, would make no sensible impression on that of a hardy ploughman." ~anne bronte