Five Favorites: Complete Randomness + A Recipe for Loaded Baked Nachos

I just felt like linking up with another five favorites post, so I decided to come up with five completely random "favorite things" of this month of July to share with all of you today.

1) Favorite Baking Project: My first wedding cake! I should have mentioned the completion of this cake in my last post about my husband Paul. He was really great in helping me finish this huge project - I needed his engineering skills to cut the wooden dowels needed to ensure the cake did not collapse once all stacked together. I was pretty pleased with how everything turned out - it was a LOT of cake and a big project. Luckily, we got the kids to bed fairly early the night before the big event and stayed up until about 1:00 AM building this beautiful cake together. I quickly snapped a picture before we delivered it, but wish I could have gotten a picture with it all set up at the party site with the cake topper. It looked great! Again, Paul is awesome.

2) Favorite New Food: Emma discovered she loves chips and salsa. Then she ditched the chips and started to attack the salsa with a spoon. This is not a girl who shies away from spice.

3) Favorite Summer Moment: Watching another beautiful summer sunset with my family. The perfect end to another perfect summer day!

4) Favorite Milestone: Emma and Matthew took their first amusement park ride together. They rode a silly little plane ride that spun and flew in a circle. Paul was scared to death that Emma was going to wiggle out of the flimsy seat belt used to keep her in the seat. I wasn't too worried - but maybe I should have been! Both kids survived and seemed to enjoy it.

5) Favorite News Headline: I got a chuckle out of the headline that made the rounds yesterday about a tree planted 10 years ago in honor of former Beatle George Harrison that grew to be 12-feet tall before succumbing to a beetle infestation. Oh the irony!

6) BONUS! Favorite Easy Meal: More often then not, our weeknight dinners have to be something quick that I can just throw together in a matter of minutes. We had lots of tortilla chips leftover from a family get-together, so I made some baked nachos that took a couple minutes to assemble, about 10 minutes to bake, and *voila* dinner was served! I think this was the meal where Emma discovered she liked salsa so much. (See #2)

Loaded Baked Nachos

1/2 pound Mexican-style chorizo sausage
1 can refried beans
1 can black beans, drained
2 cans chopped green chilies
6 green onions, chopped
2-3 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 cup black olives, sliced
8-12 ounces Monterey jack cheese, shredded

Other additions:
Chopped avocado, sour cream, salsa, queso fresco


Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Cook chorizo over medium heat in a pan. When no pink remains, stir in the refried beans and cook until heated through. Remove from heat.

Spread the chips in a greased 13x9 glass pyrex pan. Top with the chorizo/bean mixture. Top with the black beans, chilies, chopped green onions, tomatoes, olives, and cheese. Bake in the preheated oven until the cheese melts. Serve with salsa and sour cream!

Want some more, non-random favorites? Head on over to Mama Knows, Honeychild to check out what some of the other bloggers have posted!