1. I took a few minutes late this morning to ponder what I might cook for dinner. I thought about macaroni. I thought about black beans. I thought about the Fire Crack Mac at GarrenTeed BBQ. I went online in search of recipes combining pasta and black beans.
I found a vegetarian recipe for a black bean pasta sauce and I decided to try it out, but I also decided that I would add ground beef to it.
So, I browned a fistful of ground beef in a Dutch oven, pushed the meat aside when it was done, and cooked a chopped onion and two chopped sweet red peppers until they were tender. To this mixture I added minced garlic, cumin, and oregano and let it cook until fragrant. I then folded in 28 oz of tomato sauce, a 14 oz can of diced tomatoes, and three 14 oz cans of drained black beans and brought this sauce to a gentle boil and then turned the heat down so the sauce could bubble for an indeterminate amount of time.
I taste tested the sauce after it had been simmering for about an hour and decided it needed more cumin and some salt. I added them.
Debbie arrived home and said she'd like a cocktail of gin and fresh squeezed orange juice and I fixed her one.
About twenty minutes later, I boiled a 16 oz bag of rotini. I had already chopped a bunch of cilantro and grated some pepper jack cheese.
Debbie and I both dished a layer of rotini into a bowl, ladled black bean pasta sauce over it, and then topped the pasta and sauce with pepper jack cheese and cilantro.
I never would have thought to use pepper jack cheese for this dish if it weren't for GarrenTeed BBQ's Fire Crack Mac. Both Debbie and I loved the heat it brought to our bowl of pasta and sauce and, for us, cilantro is the perfect herb and we loved how it worked tonight.
2. For the third Gonzaga game in a row, I missed the tension and excitement of another close game decided with little time left on the clock.
Why didn't I watch the Zags?
Perry Mason!
Rather than watch basketball, I listened to Debbie describe some of the ways she succeeded with her students today in her third grade classroom out at Pinehurst Elementary School. Every day is a challenge. Every day Debbie expends a lot of energy. Every day Debbie comes home glad that she has this job and ready for a relaxing cocktail and the wondrous twists and turns of two or three episodes of Perry Mason.
Last night, the first episode we were watching was cut short by our part of town's three hour power outage.
So, we began by watching the episode's last nine minutes and finding out who murdered Liza, the artist, and then moved on to a couple of other episodes and watched Perry Mason methodically and ruthlessly drill down into the details of each case and extract a confession from each killer.
3. We ended the evening by taking a break from Perry Mason and watched Columbo outsmart twins, played by Martin Landau, and get to the bottom of a murder and inheritance scheme.
Wow! It was great watching Martin Landau play two arrogant characters, giving us double the fun as Colombo seems to stumble around, as he angers different people in the story, and as he digs down into the details of the case that bother him and figures out how the murder scheme worked. Brilliant!
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