Valerie Manwill writes coming of age novels and stories with quirky twists. She is an award-winning playwright and has a handful of stories published in varying anthologies. Other braggadocio includes being fluent in both Spanish and Golden Era Vines. Valerie melts in the Arizona sun with her two baby boys and snarky husband.
In case you couldn’t already tell, I have a love affair with pasta. Pasta is so great. I got this recipe from this blog here. http://www.craftymorning.com/chicken-bacon-ranch-pasta-recipe/ I was just too lazy for that recipe, so I made a quicker and easier version…
INGREDIENTS:
1 pound of pasta (penne or rotini)
2 diced chicken breasts
1 package of bacon bits
1 packet of ranch dressing mix
2 cups of milk
1 cup of cheddar cheese
2 tbsp of flour
DIRECTIONS:
Start cooking your pasta. In a skillet cook your chicken until no longer pink, (if you are as gross and lazy as me you can use a can of chicken of cooked chicken and skip this step). Add the ranch dressing, flour and 2 cups of milk to the chicken. Stir until thick. Add cheese and half of your bacon bits. Stir until melted. Combine with pasta. Garnish with extra bacon bits if desired.
I was honestly NEVER going to tell anyone this story. Seriously. I’m blushing just thinking about typing this one. But it’s a pretty funny story and my husband said it was okay, so…
*cringing so hard*
Here it is…
We had our ceremony in one city and then our open house reception in another. We planned for time to take pictures after the wedding and go right to the reception, but the shoot ended up being super quick! We had like an hour or so before the next set of pictures at the reception.
We had no clue what to do. Bum around town in our gown and tux? Go to the reception place and take a nap? Finally I was like, look… this is the most romantic day of our lives. And we have an hour to ourselves! We should do something totally spontaneous that we can say we did on our wedding day.
So we decided to drive up a random canyon to an overlook.
This one.
It was a surprisingly crowded day at this overlook so we parked on a little spot of gravel on the other side of the lot. We took some pictures and talked about how cool it is being married now. It was so sweet and romantic… too romantic actually. We started making out.
At some point during the M.O.S. I completely moved over to Daniel’s seat… I was WAY into it. But c’mon! Wedding day! There was this really loud constant noise but I was a bride and in love and didn’t pay any attention to it. Finally after a good solid minute of this loud noise we stop kissing. “Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep” What is that?
That’s when it occurred to me that I was SITTING ON THE HORN OF THE STEERING WHEEL.
oh my gosh.
And there were tons of people there too. IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Beep! Don’t mind us. Just a bride and groom mauling each other over here.
Dan looked over at the other cars and calls out, “It’s okay. We’re married now.” And we peel out of there.
lol SO ANYWAYS. You can get that picture out of your head now by looking at this! These were our Halloween costumes this year: Can you guess who we were?
valmanwill.com 