Sausage and Peppers Pasta

         Today I'd like to share an original recipe of mine! If it's not original I have no way of knowing it because I made it up off the top of my head. Anyways, it's become a family favorite. It's easy to make, feeds 4-6 good-sized servings, is DELICIOUS, and also freezes/reheats well if you don't need so many servings at a time, or just want to have it on hand for an easy dinner later. Also, while there are plenty of veggies in this, if it's a concern for non-veggie eaters, they're easy to pick around :) 

          As much as I wish it weren't so, I am the non-veggie eater in our house. I love the flavors of many of them but I'm pretty much a texture freak. Please enjoy this meme I made about my struggle.

The struggle is real.

 Moving on...

   

     I wish I had a trendier name for this stuff but this is what we call it at the house, so it's what I'm going with.  I would also like to say this dish has a lot of room for tweaking to your own personal tastes. Substitute your favorite cheese, pasta, add/remove veggies, more/less meat, etc. Love it how it is or make it your own :) 

Sausage and Peppers Pasta

 Ingredients: 

• 12-16oz (uncooked) of your favorite pasta (I prefer penne or ziti
• 14oz skinless smoked sausage
• 3 Bell Peppers of your choosing (I used 1 each of red, yellow and green)
• 1/2-3/4 average sized onion
• about 1 tbsp minced garlic, or 2-3 cloves fresh garlic, finely chopped
• about 1 cup Italian dressing 
• Parmesan or mozzarella cheese to taste 
• Butter and EVOO to saute veggies. If you use something else or choose to steam, be my guest :)

1. Julienne your bell peppers and slice your onion. If you have mandoline slicer it makes this step soooooo much easier and gives you a nice uniform size on everything (unless you're my husband, then it just gives you a good sized gash on your hand). If you don't, no biggie! I just 'em fairly thin so they don't take as long to get soft. Once everything is cut, go ahead and and throw it all, PLUS the garlic, in a pan with a few tablespoons of butter and some EVOO to start sauteing. Should look a little something like this.

2. Thinly slice sausage into medallions and start cooking them in a skillet over medium-ish heat. I usually let them cook until they look like the following picture (we like them that way :) but feel free to stop before they start to blacken if you prefer.

3. Once you get the sausage cooking, start the water boiling for your pasta. I'm no expert on getting a meal timed out together perfectly, but out of the sausage, veggies, and pasta, the pasta is what I want sitting the shortest amount of time so I always do it last. Once the water is boiling cook your pasta until fully cooked, or al dente, if you prefer.

4. If you have time while the 3 of these things are going, and you should, go ahead and start grating your parmesan, or mozzarella. You can use the pre-grated stuff, I just have found that it melts better when it's freshly grated.

5. As each segment finishes cooking, drain it and return it to a large pot/pan. Once everything is in, add Italian dressing to taste and stir. You could really eat it just like that, but is there anything in the world cheese doesn't make better? :-) Add cheese to the whole dish or let everyone add it to their own plate at the table. Enjoy!

          I got a little heavy-handed with the cheese and ended up with more of a cheese sauce than garnish. So it should look a lot like this, just less creamy. Again, a meme to help you feel my pain...

          

          If you try/want to try this recipe, do me a favor- pin it on pinterest and share on FB! And feel free to leave a comment below :)

Love It or Lose It

                If you read my first post, you’ll remember Randy and I have been married about 6 years.

                When we first got married, Randy already owned a small house. I mean 800 square feet small. The laundry was in the kitchen was in the living which had no dining. No garage. Just, small. And in an awful location, sitting on one of the busiest streets in our area.

                Nonetheless with a LOT of help from my awesome in-laws, we made that house beautiful. Tore out walls, laid laminate flooring, new kitchen cabinets, complete bathroom overhaul, new carpet and fixtures in the bedrooms, painted the entire interior and exterior, including the columns and porch, new furniture, new heat and air. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. We had taken a space that wasn’t even functional, let alone beautiful, and we made it desirable.   

                

 House before we moved in

After we moved out. Like 2-3 years after. In a slightly sadder state of repair, but you can see the difference ;-)

And it was CHEAP! Boy, was it cheap! Extremely low house payments. Could not beat the payments lol. That might be what I miss most.

Anywho, we lived there about 4 months. One night we went over to my parents’ house and within 20 received a call from the fire department telling us our house was on fire. ‘I’m sorry… what?!’ So we got over there and by the time we got there the fire was out, but it didn’t matter, it was totaled. Black from floor to ceiling, except in the bedrooms- the doors were shut so were able to salvage what was in there. But the house wasn’t livable anymore, so we sold the property and got a new place.

That was 5 years ago. The house we moved to is the house we have now. It’s about twice the size of the old house. Like the first house, it was pretty ugly when we first moved in. You would have thought we were carpet salesmen for all the carpet throughout this house. Carpet in the kitchen! Scalloping on the kitchen cabinets, those lowered ceiling box-looking fluorescent lighting looming overhead, all extremely old and highly outdated fixtures, wood paneling, bulky oddly placed built ins, the laminate countertops weren’t even trying to look good… it wasn’t much to look at. At all. Nonetheless, it had good bones, and we were in love with it. I managed to find some pictures from my *COUGH*myspace*COUGH*…. Enjoy. LOL!

This is our guest room, but it pretty much is what every room in the house looks like.

The den.

 We’ve done a few renovations that really make this place look a lot better. We painted the kitchen cabinets, updated them and covered up the scalloping, tore down the lighting, painted most rooms in the house, put down tile in the kitchen and entryway and laminate flooring in the living and dining, tore down wood paneling, etc. Brought it up to date with the times lol.

We never intended for this to be our forever home. We still don’t. But like many homeowners, it didn’t take us too long before we stopped being excited for what we had and caught ourselves in a perpetual state of ‘waiting for the next house.’ Which wouldn’t have been so bad, but the more we looked forward to a new house (which we were nowhere near being able to get, mind you) the more frustrated we became with our current home. In our minds, our home could never give us what we needed in a house, so we just kinda stopped updating. Stopped looking for ways to make it work. Stopped investing in our home. After all, if we were gonna sell this place and move we didn’t want our renovations to exceed its value (<<<convenient ‘logic’). We were pretty much ready to...

 

Lorax, anyone? :)

Well, about 4 months ago Randy and I started Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. I’ll be writing a post about this later, but here’s the paraphrase…  for YEARS we were bringing home a good sized income and seeing almost none of it. Or having some of it and spending it all within the first few days of getting paid and living on ramen for the next 2 weeks lol. It took us a long time to get there, but we had finally had enough of living paycheck to paycheck.

If you don’t know how Total Money Makeover works, I would encourage you to check it out. Briefly, it’s like this: You layout all your debt, with the smallest debt/loan/whatev to be paid off first, then the next highest amount, all the way through your highest debt (your car, house, etc.). This is the debt snowball. Then you take your income, divide it up to cover your payments for the month, and whatever money you have left over, you budget it towards everything from groceries to play money, if you so choose. So once you’ve paid off that smallest debt, you take what you would have paid if you still had it and start paying that as extra on your next highest debt, and keep doing that until eventually everything is paid off.

So we did our budget snowball and have been budgeting faithfully, and we should be debt free in a little over 2 years (minus our house). 2 years! I couldn’t believe how quickly that could happen, especially considering how much debt we have. Just knowing how close we were gave me kind of a feeling of freedom, and I never wanted to go back to financial slavery again. So I found myself asking crazy questions like…

‘How long would we have to stay here before we could save [insert $ amount here] for a downpayment on the next house?’

‘If we saved [$$$] for a downpayment, and sold this house for [$$$], what kind of house could we get without really increasing our current house payment?’

‘Wait, WHAT?!!’

And just like that, we began to see the value in our home again. Our current plan is to stay here for at least 5 more years, so instead of talking about all the flaws of our home, we started asking ourselves what we could do to fix them. Not just asking- but looking for solutions. And little by little we’re finding and implementing them. So many of them aren’t even expensive things, but they’ve added so much to our home. We’ve really fallen back in love with this place. I'll be posting some pictures soon of our current and recent projects.

We’ve lived here 5 years. And we’ve wasted too many trying to live in the future, not cherishing what we have now. And we lost out, during those times, on a home that was able to offer us so much more than we were ever willing to see.

There’s a show on HGTV called ‘Love It of List It’ where David tries to sell a family on a new (to them) home to better suit their needs while Hillary comes and remodels their current home in hopes to make them stay. I think if we all approached our homes like that… like we were really trying to solve our problems and create a place that we’ll love (again), we could come pretty close. We might even surprise ourselves.

                So I’m ending this post with a challenge- what about your home do you struggle with? What’s ugly? What doesn’t work? Now, what can you do to change that? Determine that the thing can be done, then find the way. Let’s stop losing time spent in a place we could love by giving that time to dreams and wishes of more.

                What will you do with the time left in your home?

                Will you love it, or lose it?

Welcome! A Little Bit About Me :)

     *DISCLAIMER* There is a high probability that over the course of this post, and any others in this blog, you will run into an excessive use of smileys, a handful of LOL's, frequent shameless plugs, aaaaaand probably a display of my poor handle on punctuation mark placement. Not apologizing for it, just thought you should know ;-)

     Hello and welcome!

     I've been contemplating getting a real blog for years, this is my first go at it. I named this blog 'Neither Here Nor There' because I couldn't narrow its content down to any one particular subject or interest- I enjoy many different things and I would like to share them with any one interested in reading about them.

     That being said, I'll start by sharing a little bit about myself. My name is Emily, I'm in my mid-to-late 20's, and I've been married going on 6 years to this guy...

     Randy's pretty much gold. And- you guessed it!- the hottie on the left is me (you're so smart!). I'm a stay at home mom to our beautiful girls, Jordyn and Kamryn.

     They're sweet, funny, crazy enough to keep life interesting at all times, and in the words of my favorite Sprint commercial, 'totes adorbs' :) (I made these dresses based off the tutorial found here http://www.makeit-loveit.com/2010/10/cinderella-dress-halloween-costume.html).

     We have a dog, a goldendoodle named Perry. But I'm not a pet person. He's here solely because of my husband and kids, so unless the groomer sends him home with a really funny haircut, don't count on hearing much about him (sorry pet people!).

     Anyways, I wasn't kidding when I said I have a LOT of interests.

     Some things I actually do: sing, write songs, sew, cook, crafting in general, get out my DSLR and try to get some good pictures of my kids, EXTREME(ly amateur) modeling [Check it out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Me-Up/389953237772235 and you might as well like the page while you're there! (<<<shameless plug!)], pinterest my life away, dominate and simultaneously lose friends during Catch Phrase. Yep, I'm that person. You could safely say most of that will likely cover the content of my blog.

     Lastly, I recently became a consultant for Jamberry Nails. Generally speaking I'm not the direct sales type, but I pretty much fell in love with them and since I plan on wearing them all the time (I mean look at these, who wouldn't?!) the hubs and I agreed that the consultant price was the way to go. LOL!

     [to learn more about Jamberry, check out my site emilykenepp.jamberrynails.net (last plug, promise!)]

     Well, that's all I can think of for now. Honestly, I have no idea if you're able to comment on here, but if you are, feel free to do so and I'll try to keep up with them best I can. Until next time, friends :)