Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was scrolling through my Pasta board on Pinterest this afternoon, looking for a dinner idea that didn’t involve thawing hunks of meat, when I came across this BLT Skillet.  Hey, I thought.  Bacon thaws quickly…and so my dinner plan was born.  I sent my oldest to cadge a garden tomato or two from our neighbors–our plants are just starting to produce, and I only had one left after Sunday’s dinner–and set the bacon outside in the shade, because it hit triple digits today.  I even scrounged up some linguine, which I normally avoid because it’s so hard for toddlers to get it to their mouths instead of all over themselves, because you can only eat so much penne and rotini, you know?  (It wasn’t whole wheat like the recipe called for, but it was linguine!)

Now, since the recipe only guaranteed two servings, I decided I’d better triple it, which is where the distraction enters in.  I cooked up the whole pound of bacon but managed to remember to save a quarter of it for another time; I cooked up the whole pound of linguine, as well, and then thoughtlessly dumped it into my skillet and stirred.  As I stirred, I noted that the pasta seemed to be overwhelming the rest of the skillet ingredients; by the time I realized that an extra four ounces of pasta was the likely culprit, I’d stirred enough that trying to remove any wasn’t worth it.

Ah, well.

The good news is that it was tasty–the two-year-old took a bite or two and proclaimed “I YIKE this dinner!”–especially with the fresh parsley and real Parmesan. It was drier and stickier than it should have been, of course, but I finally just added the rest of the lemon’s juice to mine, and even before that I was enjoying it.  If you have garden tomatoes and parsley that need using, try this for dinner.  Just pay attention to what you’re putting in as you make it!