William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English playwright and poet who is regarded as the ultimate master of the english language. I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to feature The Bard. I think I’ve only read two of his plays, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, which was part of my high school english curriculum. I’m keen to adapt more of his stuff so if you have any suggestions feel free to post them in the comments below. Now, if only a brilliant, modern-day film director would adapt a Shakespeare play that could be enjoyed by today’s geek masses. Oh, what’s that? Joss Whedon just did that with Much Ado About Nothing? How convenient.
INTERESTED IN A SIGNED SHAKESPEARE PRINT?
I’m planning on getting this comic made into sets of four LIMITED EDITION and SIGNED prints, with each quote and scene being it’s own piece (something like this). If you’re interested in purchasing one or a set of all four and would like to be notified of their availability then please leave your email in the space below. There is no obligation to buy once you sign up – it’s just to give me an idea of how many to get printed and will also ensure you get priority notification. I promise you will only get mail regarding these prints and nothing else, and you will need to input your address even if you have already signed up for the free posters and email updates. THANKS!
Big Ol’ Bugaboo hasn’t seen his hoomin Lt. Gary D. in six months+, and it’s time to make up for that! I’d get out an entirely new tissue box before hitting the button. The lighting on this one is a little dodgy, but it’s worth it.
Some days just call for something easy. You know the ones: when the to-do list is never-ending and dinner needs to happen like now. So whenever I’m tired and I’m hungry, quick skillet pasta dishes like this Creamy Tomato and Spinach Pasta are perfect for such an occasion. This easy spinach pasta recipe only requires a few ingredients, cooks up super fast, is perfect for any day of the week, and leaves me feeling full and happy. And judging by the rave reviews, I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one who keeps this recipe on regular rotation! 😊
“This dish is amazing! Was extremely impressed with how flavorful it is. Definitely will be making it again”
Sheryl
Easy Recipe for Tomato Spinach Pasta
Spinach pasta doesn’t have to be fancy to be good. I make this one with pantry staples and a few fridge basics, and it still delivers major comfort. It’s creamy, garlicky, and loaded with flavor, all without spending much at all. It’s the kind of thing I can throw together without overthinking it, and even picky eaters don’t argue whenever I make this on pasta night!
Recipe Success Tips & Suggestions
If you’re not into cream cheese, you could add a splash (1/4 cup or so) ofhalf and half or heavy cream to achieve a similar effect.
I used regular pasta, but whole wheat would actually be pretty good in this and would add some extra fiber and nutrients. You can also switch out the shape for another short pasta, like bowtie pasta or rotini.
If fresh spinach is just out of your price range, you can add about 8 oz frozen spinach that has been thawed and squeezed of its excess moisture.
I think this recipe would be delicious with added veggies, too. Mushrooms, zucchini,bell peppers, and thinly sliced carrots would all work well. I’d cook them with the onions and garlic in the beginning and then carry on with the recipe as written.
Some readers have also had success making this a one-pot pasta with spinach! To do this, they added the dry pasta with the tomatoes, seasonings, and water, but bumped the total amount of water up to about 2 cups total. Simmer until the pasta is cooked, adding more water if needed, then add the cream cheese, parm, and spinach!
Easier than a box meal, this creamy tomato and spinach pasta is also more flavorful and delicious. 100% real ingredients. Perfect for busy weeknights!
Step-by-step photos can be seen below the recipe card.
Course Dinner, Main Course
Cuisine American
Total Cost $4.80 recipe / $1.20 serving
Prep Time 5 minutes minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes minutes
Total Time 25 minutes minutes
Servings 4
Calories 363kcal
Equipment
Medium Skillet
Whisk
Measuring Cups Spoons
Ingredients
½ lb penne pasta $0.49
1 yellow onion small dice, 340g, 1.5 cups, $0.78
2 cloves garlic minced, 1 Tbsp, $0.12
1 Tbsp olive oil $0.18
14.5 oz. diced tomatoes 1 can, $0.96
½ tsp dried oregano $0.12
½ tsp dried basil $0.13
⅛ tsp crushed red pepper $0.02
½ tsp salt $0.02
½ tsp freshly cracked black pepper $0.08
2 Tbsp tomato paste $0.14
½ cup water $0.00
2 oz cream cheese $0.46
¼ cup grated Parmesan 30g, $0.51
4 oz fresh spinach $0.79
Instructions
Gather and prepare all ingredients.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and continue to boil until tender (7-10 minutes). Drain the pasta in a colander.
While the pasta is cooking, prepare the creamy tomato sauce. Dice the onion and mince the garlic. Add the onion, garlic, and olive oil to a large skillet and sauté over medium heat until the onions are soft and translucent (3-5 minutes).
Add the diced tomatoes (with juices), oregano, basil, crushed red pepper, salt, and some freshly cracked pepper to the skillet. Stir to combine. Add the tomato paste and a 1/2 cup of water to the skillet and stir until the tomato paste has mixed into the sauce.
Turn the heat down to low. Cut the cream cheese into a few pieces and then add them to the skillet with the tomato sauce. Use a whisk to stir the sauce until the cream cheese has fully melted and the sauce is creamy. Add the Parmesan to the skillet and stir until it is melted into the sauce.
Add the fresh spinach to the skillet and gently stir it into the sauce until it has wilted (2-3 minutes). Add the pasta and stir until it is well coated in the creamy tomato sauce. Taste and adjust the salt and pepper as needed. Serve warm.
How to Make Creamy Tomato and Spinach Pasta Step-by-Step Photos
Gather all of your ingredients.
Cook the pasta: Bring a pot of water to a boil. Once boiling, add ½ lb. penne pasta. Boil the pasta until tender, then drain in a colander. You’ll prepare the creamy tomato sauce while the pasta is cooking.
Sauté the onion and garlic: Add 1 diced yellow onion and 2 cloves minced garlic to a large skillet with 1 Tbsp olive oil. Sauté over medium heat for 3-5 minutes, or until the onion is soft and translucent.
Make the sauce: Add ½ tsp dried basil, ½ tsp dried oregano, ½ tsp salt, ⅛ tsp crushed red pepper, ½ tsp freshly cracked pepper, and one 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes (with juices) to the skillet and stir to combine.
Also, add 2 Tbsp tomato paste and ½ cup water to the skillet. This will help make the sauce thicker and with a more tomatoey punch. Continue to stir and cook over medium heat until the tomato paste has been mixed into the sauce.
Turn the heat down to low. Cut 2 oz cream cheese into chunks and add it to the skillet. Stir or whisk the sauce until the cream cheese has melted into the sauce. It will look a little clumpy at first, but the cream cheese will eventually melt and the sauce will smooth out.
Once the cream cheese has melted in, add ¼ cup grated Parmesan. Stir until the Parmesan has melted into the sauce.
Stir in the spinach: Add 4 oz fresh spinach to the skillet. Stir the skillet until the heat from the sauce wilts the spinach (1-2 minutes).
Add the pasta: Finally, add the cooked and drained pasta to the skillet and stir to combine.
Serve immediately and enjoy!
Shown garnished with extra Parmesan and freshly cracked pepper.
serving suggestions
This creamy tomato and spinach pasta is kind of a meal on its own, but I’m never one to turn down a good side. A slice of crusty garlic bread is always a win with pasta, and if you want to bulk things up a bit, you could top it with sliced baked chicken breast or brown some Italian sausage in the skillet before adding the onion and garlic. Add a simple Caesar salad, and you’ve got a full dinner spread that feels a little extra special (all while keeping to a budget, of course).
Storage & Reheating
Let any leftovers cool before storing them in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3-4 days. If you want to reheat it, you could use the microwave or warm it gently on the stovetop with a splash of water to loosen up the sauce.
Our Creamy Tomato and Spinach Pasta recipe was originally published on 8/13/2013. It was retested, reworked, and republished to be better than ever5/28/25.
Taylor Mali (1965-) is a an American slam poet who has been part of four winning teams at the National Poetry Slam competition. What Teachers Make is Mali’s most well-known poem and was born out of an actual dinner conversation he had. You can view Mali performing the poem in this video and more of his work on his YouTube channel. The poem was also the title of a book Mali wrote: What Teachers Make – In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. Mali worked as an English, History and Math teacher for nine years and continues to be an advocate for teachers all over the world.
I thought this poem would make a good follow-up to last week’s Erica Goldson graduation speech. While the system might not be perfect, teachers are the unsung heroes of the education system and I have nothing but praise and respect for the profession. Teachers can make all the difference – having a mediocre one can really damage a student’s potential, but the right one can inspire a child to greatness.
I’m really honoured that a lot of teachers have told me they use Zen Pencils comics in the classroom. It’s something I never planned on happening and is such a thrill. It also makes perfect sense – I would have paid way more attention to poetry and history if they were taught with the aid of cartoons. If you’re one such teacher (or a student on the receiving end), then please share how you use them in the comments.
UPDATE:I’ve been in touch with Taylor Mali and he has kindly given me permission to make this available as a print. He also will be donating his share of the profits to The Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he is currently teaching poetry. Taylor even told me that he has used the comic as a slideshow while performing the poem – which is pretty freakin’ awesome!
- Taylor Mali’s official website.
- Thanks to George for submitting the poem.
- Zen Pencils is on GoComics! My archives will be updating regularly on the biggest comics website in the world, where you can also read the entire archives of hundreds of famous comics such as Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert and Peanuts. It’s really an honour to have my work alongside these legendary strips, especially Calvin & Hobbes, which is my all-time biggest influence and inspiration. There’s also a great GoComics app you can download so you can read all your favourite strips on your phone or tablet.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” Sobering words from Aristotle, and an astute reminder that success doesn’t come overnight. On the contrary, it’s discipline that gets you from Point A to the often elusive Point B.
In our day-to-day lives, habits can often be tough to build, as there are plenty of distractions that can lead us off the “straight and narrow” and right back to our old ways. To alleviate some of those troubles we can examine some academic research on motivation, discipline, and habit building, and break down their findings into actionable steps that any aspiring habit-builder can put into place.
1. Make “micro quotas” and “macro goals”
In a fascinating study on motivation, researchers found abstract thinking to be an effective method to help with discipline. In the most basic sense, “dreaming big” is pretty good advice after all. And since a variety of research around the self-determination theory shows us that creating intrinsic motivators (being motivated to do things internally, not through punishments or rewards) is an essential process of building habits that stick, you need to find a way to balance this desire to dream big with your day-to-day activities, which often do not result in quick, dramatic changes.
The answer is to create what I call “micro quotas” and ”macro goals.” Your goals should be the big picture items that you wish to someday accomplish, but your quotas, are the minimum amounts of work that you must get done every single day to make the bigger goal a reality. Quotas make each day approachable, and your goals become achievable because of this.
Writer/developer Nathan Barry has made for a great case study of the use of these quotas as someone who forced himself to write 1000 words per day come hell or high-water. The result was three self-published books resulting in thousands of dollars in sales.
2. Create behavior chains
Creating sticky habits is far easier when we make use of our current routines, instead of trying to fight them. The concept of if-then planning is built around environmental “triggers” that we can use to let us know that it’s time to act on our habit. Also known implementation intentions, this tactic involves picking a regular part of your schedule and then building another “link in the chain” by adding a new habit.
For instance, instead of “I will keep a cleaner house,” you could aim for, “When I come home, I’ll change my clothes and then clean my room/office/kitchen.” Multiplestudies confirm this to be a successful method to rely on contextual cues over willpower. So the next time you decide to “eat healthier,” instead try “If it is lunch time, Then I will only eat meat and vegetables.”
3. Eliminate excessive options
According to a variety of research on self-control —and expounded upon in books like The Willpower Effect — there is great power in being boring. Take, for instance, Barack Obama’s insistence to never wear anything but blue and gray suits. According to the president, “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make too many decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
The president’s belief is well supported by the research—Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues’ study on self-control found that making repeated choices depleted the mental energy of their subjects, even if those choices were mundane and relatively pleasant. According to the Harvard Business Review, if you want to maintain long term discipline, it’s best to “Identify the aspects of your life that you consider mundane — and then ‘routinize’ those aspects as much as possible. In short, make fewer decisions.”
For lasting change, the steps you take must ultimately change your environment and schedule. Stop buying snacks if you want to stop snacking (no willpower needed), pack a very similar lunch every day of the week, and embrace the power of routine to get the necessary done each day.
4. Process plan (but don’t fantasize)
The step that many people skip when they fantasize about building a certain habit is they never clearly answer why they want the change to occur. It may seem like a small detail, but it plays a huge role in keeping our motivation up over time. A variety of research shows us that excessive fantasizing about results can be extremely detrimental to the stickiness of any habit.
According to this study from UCLA, the mistake is in what we visualize. Researchers found that those participants who engaged in visualizations that included the process of what needed to be done to achieve the goal (ex: fantasizing about learning another language, by visualizing themselves practicing every day after work) were more likely to stay consistent than their peers (that visualized themselves speaking French on a trip to Paris). The visualization process worked for two reasons:
Planning: visualizing the process helped focus attention on the steps needed to reach the goal.
Emotion: visualization of individual steps led to reduced anxiety.
5. Eliminate “ah-screw-its”
New habits are often very fragile, and it is for this reason that we must eliminate any source of friction that may lead us astray. These “ah-screw-it” moments (hat tip to blogger Derek Halpern) are the specific moments where you find yourself saying, “Screw this, it’s not worth the effort!” A more scientific take on this phenomenon is called the What the Hell Effect, which explains why we are so likely to abandon ship with a new habit at the first slip-up.
The solution? Examine your habit and find exactly where things start to break down. In a great example of putting this in action, Author and 99U speaker Ramit Sethi has explained how he improved his gym attendance by finding where things would slip:
When I sat down to analyze why I wasn’t going to the gym, I realized: my closet was in another room. That meant I had to walk out in the cold [to] put on my clothes. It was easier to just stay in bed. Once I realized this, I folded my clothes and shoes the night before. When I woke up the next morning, I would roll over and see my gym clothes sitting on the floor. The result? My gym attendance soared by over 300%.
You can even incorporate an “if-then” scenario once you find the culprit. For instance, if fatigue is stopping you from playing guitar after work, you could set up a system of “If I’m feeling tired after work, then I will take a 20-minute nap and listen to music for five minutes to get myself motivated.”
I love reading on my Kindle, but the screen is just too small and blurry to be useful for PDF files. While it's lacking in customizability, PDF4Kindle solves this problem pretty well by converting PDF files into Amazon's native .mobi format, all while being completely web-based.
No Japão, a forma mais simples, rápida e eficiente de se vender alguma coisa é utilizando colegiais japonesas. É mais ou menos como algumas empresas brasileiras de cerveja (não todas) que colocam garotas bonitas de biquíni para fazer a propaganda de seus produtos. Uma prática que eu acho nociva de várias formas, mas não vou entrar nestes méritos.
Em um comercial pra lá de bizarro, uma suposta empresa real chamada Sagawa Electronics (que milagrosamente tem o mesmo nome da empresa Sagawa Electronics do mangá Ghost in the Shell, mas puxa vida…), está vendendo um exoesqueleto que promete transformar a pessoa em alguém mais forte e mais alto.
O vídeo é apresentado pelo personagem “Scarface Santaro“, e conduz o espectador através de uma demonstração do projeto, que recebeu o nome de Powered Jacket MK3. No estúdio, o robô-vestível é utilizado por uma menina, mas um outro rapaz leva a armadura para as ruas do Japão, que mostra que é possível subir e descer escadas, correr e até mesmo realizar movimentos mais precisos, como segurar um ovo sem quebrá-lo. Algo que, certamente, um ser humano comum jamais vai conseguir fazer sem utilizar um robô-mecha assim.
Veja o comercial:
Segundo o site “oficial”, o exoesqueleto pesa 25 kg, tem 2,25 metros de altura e será oferecido em quantidade limitada de 5 unidades iniciais. Os interessados devem se cadastrar neste link, sabendo que o valor de pré-venda é de US$ 123 mil e a entrega deverá ser feita no dia 28 de julho, no Wonder Festival 2013. E este valor não inclui a mocinha japonesa, que fique claro para os deturpados mentais.
PS: Posso estar enganado, nunca se sabe, mas é muito provável que este vídeo seja um viral de um anime japonês e que esse produto não vá ser comercializado de verdade
Me llegó un email de un amigo preguntando sobre hoteles. Mucha gente me pregunta sobre el mismo tema y la verdad es que nunca me he querido mojar porque lo de recomendar hoteles o restaurantes es un tema delicado
Ahora viene el lio padre, hoteles, leyendo tus libros, no me aclaro, no se que barrio es “mejor”. Nosotros buscamos un barrio que tenga vida nocturna, Shibuya?? Pero los hoteles de Shibuya no nos convence tanto, como los hoteles de Shinjuku. ¿Como esta la comunicación nocturna? ¿El tren/metro cierra por las noches, como por ejemplo pasa en Madrid?
Barrios, trenes, comunicación nocturna
En Tokio suelo recomendar quedarse por Shibuya o Shinjuku que es donde hay más ambiente en la ciudad. Otra opción es buscar por la zona de Ueno/Asakusa/Akihabara o cerca de la estación de Tokio donde los hoteles son en general algo más baratos pero te quedas a una media hora en tren de Shibuya/Shinjuku/Harajuku. Shinagawa también es una zona muy bien conectada y con buenos hoteles. En general todo hotel dentro de la línea circular Yamanote podéis considerar que está bien situado.
En cuanto a los trenes, cierran entre las 12 y la una de la madrugada (Dependiendo de la línea) y vuelven a abrir a partir de las 5 de la madrugada. Moverse en taxi es bastante caro.
Hoteles baratos (Menos de 10.000 yenes por persona/noche)
Zona de Shinjuku: Shinjuku Higashi hotel (Está algo apartado de la estación pero se puede ir caminando sin problemas desde Shinjuku station)
Few things are better on a hot summer day than a frozen drink, and you can beat the heat with your own soda slushes at home with absolutely no special equipment.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated kids' biography of Paul Erdős, the fantastically prolific itinerant mathematician who published more papers than any other mathematician in history.
Boy is written by Deborah Heiligman, with illustrations by LeUyen Pham, and the pair really worked to weave numbers and mathematics through the text, with lively, fun illustrations of a young Erdős learning about negative numbers, becoming obsessed with prime numbers and leading his high-school chums on a mathematical tour of Budapest. They also go to great lengths to capture the upside and downside of Erdős's legendary eccentricity -- his inability to fend for himself and his helplessness when it came to everyday tasks like cooking and doing laundry; his amazing generosity and brilliance and empathy in his working and personal life.
Ultimately, this is a book that celebrates the idea of following your weird, wooing the muse of the odd, and playing to your strengths rather than agonizing over your weaknesses. It's an inspiring and sweet tale of one of humanity's greatest mathematicians, and a parable about the magic of passion and obsession.
My daughter, who is five, demanded that I read it to her three times in a row, over three bedtimes, which is always a vote of confidence.
eeeeeeyyyy
eeeeeyyyy
eyyyyyyyy
Gatos são sinceros.
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