Recipe: Low Fat Sausage & Peppers over Whole Wheat Pasta

I have a love-hate thing with sausage. Being Italian, I grew up eating the stuff and few things compare to sausage & peppers in marinara sauce over pasta. YUM. However, being health and calorie conscious, sausage wrecks havoc on my internal dietitian. And I hate how I feel after eating fatty foods, no matter how much I enjoy eating it at the time. So last night I made a low fat version, and this is what I did:

Put 1 pound of ground pork in a large skillet (I ground it myself from a pork loin, so there was practically no fat).

Into a cup of water, add: ½ tsp of: Sage, Savory, Marjoram, White pepper, Garlic, salt to taste, and 1 TBSP olive oil (You can also add some cayenne pepper for heat if you're into that.)

Mix the spices with the olive oil and water, mix well. Add to ground pork, stir well, and cook until no longer pink. (The water will take the place of the fat and keep the pork from clumping. It'll evaporate while the pork cooks.  Magic, I tell you.)

While the pork is cooking...

Get water for pasta on to boil.

Slice: 1 onion and 2 bell peppers (I used 1 green bell pepper, ½ of a red bell pepper, and ½ of a yellow bell pepper just for fun) and toss it right in to the pork. The meat was so lean there was nothing to drain, hooray!

Turn the heat to high and pour in 1 jar of pasta sauce. Stir well, bring to a boil. When it boils, drop to a simmer and cover.

Add pasta to the water and cook per directions....we used 8 oz of whole wheat spaghetti.

Dinner can be served as soon as the pasta is done. 

Or it can continue to simmer while your husband changes your toddler's diaper and you set the table (as in our case) :)  Enjoy!!

Honors English Essay Writing (or: How to Write Damn-near Anything)

In high school I was lucky enough to have had the toughest Honors English teacher on the planet, Mrs. Starr Whitney.  She was demanding, critical, thorough, and, above all, excellent.  I didn't appreciate her one bit until I was in college and realized that very few of my peers could write a really sharp research paper.  She empowered me with an advantage over many other students. Not being stressed-out or intimidated about the HOWs of writing papers frees you to focus entirely on the WHATs of your topics, giving you an academic edge. I recently found my Honors English Notebook and felt nostalgic and grateful, so I have decided to share the process of writing a persuasive essay or thesis paper.

What this teacher expected of us was simple and in no way negotiable.  Here were our expectations quoted directly from the notebook:

"A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination." ~Nelson Mandela

First post on the blog!

Why this blog??  Well,.....usually my content and subject matter have a specific direction, a purpose, parameters, ...restrictions.  This, my friend, this is freedom!  As a writer, this should be easy. Then again, anyone who's ever picked up a pen in an attempt to write something meaningful knows that daunting and cold return stare of a blank sheet of paper or blank screen. 

So I got to thinking....again...and I started reading through copious amounts of past writings.  I read through everything I could get my hands on: past emails, past journals, past love stories, past drama.  I laughed, I gasped, I cringed, and most importantly,