Guess I don't use Cream of Tartar much....

Tonight's been a BUSY night! I got home from work around 4:45 and cuddled on the couch a bit with Lucas before he went off to work. I've found that although I miss him immensely when he works nights, I get LOTS of stuff done. I've cleaned out my sons room, shampooed carpets, scrubbed baseboards and many other projects on the nights he works. Tonight I decided to cook.

I had some pumpkin in the fridge I needed to use, and some bananas going bad, and had bought bunches of apples to make applesauce. I also needed to use up the leftover chicken and make some dinner.

I started out freezing the bananas...you'll find out why another day ;)

Then I sat down to a DVR'd Saturday Night Live to attack this pile of apples:


30 minutes or so later:

I used red delicious, roma and golden delicious apples. Bilo had them on sale - 3 pounds for $2...had to get lots!!

I used a different recipe tonight for the applesauce than the other night. I changed this a bit. I added more honey and less brown sugar. I would have used no sugar at all, but I ran out of honey. I also used about a tablespoon or so or lemon juice rather than the orange peel. I'm not sure how exact that is, since I really just kind of dumped some in.


Applesauce, pre-smashed. See that it's already turning to sauce, all on it's own?

I only used 22 apples, not 24 like the recipe called for, but still got 2 and 1/2 quarts. It was tasty warm. I hope it's as good cold. I sealed these jars so we can put them in the cupboard for when we need it.


Next up: Chicken Pot Pie. I previously posted about this recipe here. I really only used the filling and sauce tonight. I used a regular Pillsbury deep dish crust for the bottom and then added mashed potatoes to the top, instead of a top crust. Tonight's picture even looks the same as the other night we made this!!


This is where the camera died, so no more pictures of this meal - just be assured that it came out great. Pot Pie meets Shepards Pie....yummy!

Next on the list were pumpkin brownies. I really didn't want to make a bread, or muffins with the leftover pumpkin so I googled my way to this recipe. I stuck to this recipe completely, and my brownies didn't look ANYTHING like the picture.

(camera re-charged!)




They are very tasty though, and not bad for a first try.

After I got done cooking, I decided to clean out my cupboard that holds all my spices and baking goods. A few months ago, I needed nutmeg for something and dug and dug and found some. Apparently I didn't use it often, because I recognized the jar as being from a grocery store in NY, that had been closed for a LONG time. Sure enough, I looked on the label and saw this:



I don't know if you can see it, but it says 1991!!! However, I keep using it, and it seems fine. Then again, maybe it doesn't....I wouldn't really know, since I don't use it often.

So tonight I found something worse...can you see the date on this can??



Yes, that says 1977. The Cream of Tartar is AS OLD AS ME. I threw both away and put nutmeg on the grocery list. I'll wait on the other until I need it....which probably won't be soon.

Melissa picked a peck of pickled peppers

But first she had breakfast. Pumpkin part 3! I had some very, very yummy pumpkin pie yogurt, topped with this Kashi Apple Orchard granola. It has raisins and apples and some kind of nuts and oats....sooo good!!

I had half a bottle of this apple juice with it, along with my water mixed with pomegranate blueberry that I drink all day long at work. Nice fall-type breakfast!


Lunch was some celery and peanut butter and a chicken sandwich. Not exciting and the picture is even less exciting. I must work on food staging...another day.


So, I didn't pick a peck of pickled peppers. I don't know how much a peck is. But we did have quite a few that needed to be dealt with. We've been harvesting peppers for about a month and just piling them up. Not a peck, probably, but we did have THIS many:

And we didn't pick them already pickled, of course. But every one of these guys ended up in a nice vinegar, salt and garlic bath.


I wish that I had taken a picture of the full jars, but I did not. You get the idea though.

I also put together another jar of dill pickles. These aren't from our garden, but I bought a pile of pickling cucumbers at Lowes Foods on Sunday (it cost me less than $2.00!). I can't wait for these babies to be ready!!



Tonight I decided to use up the apples in the fridge that were going soft. I made some homemade applesauce!!

Yummy apples and cinnamon on the stove:
Applesauce is super easy to make! I peeled, cored and chopped about 8 apples, added 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 tsp cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg and a splash of lemon juice. Cook it all together until the apples are soft. Let the apples cool and mash it up. I used a hand mixer. It came out just a little chunky, like I like it!



I think I've now preserved everything we had to preserve for the week. I may go buy a bunch more of those cucumbers and look for a bushel of apples, because I'd like to have a cupboard full of this stuff!!

Pumpkin, continued

I wish I had seen this last night when I made my lonnnggg pumpkin post. Anyway, here's a link to a Whole Foods blog post...all about pumpkin! Enjoy!

The Great Pumpkin

"There he is! There he is! It's the Great Pumpkin! He's rising out of the pumpkin patch" ~ Linus

Nope, no Great Pumpkin, it's just me. I've been gone awhile, I know. I've had some things going on that distracted me from this and from my enthusiasm for being in the kitchen, but I'm back and ready to get going all over again!

It's fall, and there seem to be pumpkins everywhere! In the stores, in yards, even in beer! I've never eaten pumpkin outside of the regular pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving, so last week I decided to try pumpkin bread. As usual, I looked for a recipe that had no sugar and found this one on the website for the National Honey Board. To change it up a little, I added cranberries to it. Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough honey, and I think I overcooked it. It was tasty, but horribly dry. I ate a couple of slices, and then it sat there. I hate that I didn't take a picture of it but, at the moment I wasn't thinking about the blog. Bad me.

This morning, I was struck with the urge to get back in the kitchen. I spent all morning in there! First thing I did was to freeze some bananas. I had no idea that I could do that! I can't wait to use them in all sorts of things. Then I went on a quest to salvage this dry, dry, dry pumpkin bread. It was either use it today, or toss it, which I wasn't excited about doing. My first idea was to make a slice of pumpkin bread french toast.



I simply sliced off a chunk of the bread, dipped it in a mix of egg and milk and cooked it in a pan with some butter - like you would with any other french toast. I didn't add any cinnamon or anything, since it was already full of spices. On the side, I chopped up an apple, sauteed it in some butter, and added some cinnamon and nutmeg. SO GOOD. I will be doing this with apples ALL the time now!! End result of the repurposed pumpkin bread? I'll give it a 3 out of 5. The "french toasting" of it didn't help the fact that it was dry. I didn't have any good maple syrup, so I drizzled some awful "pancake syrup" on the side of the plate to add some moisture. Tasty, but probably one of the worst things for me that I've eaten in awhile!

I still had 3/4 of a loaf of pumpkin bread. We had decided to roast a small chicken for dinner, and came up with the idea of making a stuffing out of the rest of the bread. I was worried about mixing it with celery and onion and how it would all taste.




Here's a semi-accurate version of how I made it. I really kind of just tossed it together, but here's what it was like:

3 cups toasted pumpkin bread croutons
1 stalk of celery, diced
1/3 onion, diced
1 1/2 tbsp poultry seasoning
3 tbsp butter
1/4 - 1/3 cup of chicken broth
handful of dried cranberries

Toss the croutons and cranberries in the poultry seasoning and set aside. Saute the celery and onion in butter until tender. Mix the butter mixture into the croutons, stirring to coat. Add chicken broth to moisten. Place in casserole dish, cover and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. You may want to stir it up half way through, to be sure all the croutons are moistened.

I'll give this reincarnation of the pumpkin bread a 4.5 out of 5. I'll have to try it again with some bread that isn't so dry, but it really was tasty. We've already requested to bring the stuffing to Thanksgiving dinner, and this will be the recipe we use!!

Off to bed now! I'll be back more often, I swear!

To take you out....

Rainy Days

What's better on a rainy day than toasty bread and warm soup? Last night, after dinner was on it's way to being done, I decided to start a loaf of Jalapeno Cheddar Bread and a batch of Black Bean and Roasted Red Pepper Soup.

I looked back through my posts and couldn't find anyplace that I had given you the link to my very favorite bread recipe. We've made this Jalapeno Cheddar Bread in the bread machine a bunch of times, but this time it was definitely the best. The peppers I added were ones that we had dehydrated a few weeks ago. Some bites of the bread were pretty spicy - and delicious!

Look at the big hunks of pepper!!

When I made the Cuban Chicken the other night, I had prepared an entire pound of black beans. I didn't even use half of the beans, so I needed to find other things to do with it. I used some today for lunch, in my turkey wrap. Some more went into this Black Bean and Roasted Red Pepper Soup. I changed the recipe a little. I only used 1.5 red peppers and used 2 jalapenos instead of the pobalanos, and I roasted them on the grill. I used the vegetable stock to make a totally vegan soup (until I dropped sour cream in my bowl!)

We topped our soup with some sour cream, avacado, and tomatoes.


This was the first time we bought this large avacado. We stopped at Walmart to pick some up and while we were discussing the difference between the large lighter colored avacado and the small tough skinned darker ones, another shopper was nice enough to tell us the difference and which was better to use in certain recipes. Score one for Walmart shoppers - though that won't convince me to start shopping there again!!


Soup in the pan:

Soup in the bowl, with a side of toasty, buttery bread:


So good!! Even though it was rainy out, which would usually be perfect for the spicy, filling food - we decided to cut back on using the air conditioning, so it was a little warmer in the house than I would have liked for this food. It was still delicious, though!!!

Going to do some reading - time to start Harry Potter 3!!

Good night!

Wanted: Inspiration

I've been pretty down on myself lately on my eating healthy habits, which is why I haven't been on here much. We're still doing really well focusing on whole foods, maybe too well. I feel like we've been eating too much REAL butter, REAL sour cream, and other stuff like heavy cream. I'm going to start making it a point to back away from the fatty whole foods for a bit. Some may say maybe we should eat the fat-free sour cream, etc., but I challenge you to find some that isn't full of junk. Seriously. Look at the ingredients in real sour cream and then look at the ingredients in fat-free. My rule for ingredients is the fewer, the better - and I need to know what the words mean, or it's probably nothing I want.

That being said, I'm hoping to have some better posts up here. Tonight we had turkey sausage and apple cole slaw for dinner. No pics because we were rushing to get everything done in time to sit down for House. To replace tonight's pictures, I'll give you a quick run down of the weekend past.


Friday night we went to do some grocery shopping and found these Wheat Thins Flatbread crackers that are all natural!! We topped it with 1/2 a brick of brie while we cooked the rest of our dinner. (see....fatty, fatty cheese....but oh so good!)

Dinner was Portobello Mushroom Caps, stuffed with Scallops and Sun-Dried Tomatoes. I just sauteed the scallops, mushroom stems and sun-dried tomatoes in the pan with some garlic.

Then we stuffed the scallops in these caps that had been on the grill, and topped them with a slice of havarti cheese (more fatty fatty cheese).


We decided on Friday to venture into the world of boxed wine. We hadn't bought it yet I guess because we felt there was something redneck about it...but this box was the equivalent of 4 bottles for the price of 1.5!!

Action shot....pouring the first glass. Tasted as good as the bottle - I'm sold!

Dinner with some brussel sprouts.

Chuck was trying to get his own dinner. He sat in this position for at least 20 minutes, which is a long time for a Jack Russel. See the stick bug in the bottom of the picture? That was his focus.

Saturday morning we were up and on the beach by 7:45-8:00. This is a good vision to start your day with!
We were there to do the Browns Backers (spelled wrong on the sign!) beach sweep before heading off to Nathan's KAB (Keep America Beautiful) Kids beach sweep.
KAB had a great turn out!

We found these pretty flowers all the way down the street to the beach. I had to take a picture!

KAB sign...

Sunday was football and bad snacking, but a delicious home made grilled chicken salad for dinner.

I really hope we can get back in a healthier groove, because I've been feeling just all around blah, and I'm sure it's because of the diet!! Wish us luck!!

Good night!!

My how the week flies by!!

I have (thankfully!) been SO busy at work this week, that writing a blog and paying attention to the food we've been eating really has been one of the last things on my mind! I keep thinking to myself "well, this would be a good picture" or "I could write about this" and then don't snap the shot, or make a note, and then it's out of my mind. I'm really glad to be busy at work, but I miss the days where I have at least a few minutes to think about non-work things while sitting at my desk! So, I'll hit the highlights and the things I DID think about!

Monday night we had our first squash of the (almost) fall. We'd had some summer squash here and there, but that's not the same. It doesn't have that cozy feeling that some of the winter squash has. Lucas had never eaten acorn squash before, so I bought some for him to try. Simply cut it in half, place it face down in a dish with a little bit of water and steam in the microwave for 10-15 minutes, until a fork slides in when you poke it. I like mine with lots of melted butter and some brown sugar, and eat it right out of the shell. We had the squash with some boiled red potatoes and bbq (from scratch!) pork chops. Good dinner!


Sugary, buttery yum!


A while back I ordered from free samples via a blog I read: Hangry Pants. She referred me to the site the samples actually came from - here. I got this package of chia seeds and another package of something that I haven't broken into yet...saving that for another post!




Anyway, I dropped some of the chia seeds in my yogurt for breakfast Tuesday. I didn't add much, since I didn't know what to expect, so I'm not sure what effect it had. Guess I'll read up on it a little more, then finish off the pack. If anyone knows the benefits of chia seeds, fill me in!


That leads us to tonight. Our friend Tara came over for dinner, and we decided to try out a new recipe. Cuban Chicken with Black Beans. The only thing I would change in the recipe would be to use boneless, skinless breast. Boneless because I'm not a fan of bone-in chicken, skinless because the skin got kind of soggy after cooking in all the liquid and beans. Other than that, the meal was delicious!! We had to use green pepper rather than red, and we used brown rice. YUM!!


Tara brought dessert. She remembered that Lucas can't eat sugar, and brought him a sugar free chocolate ice cream. He had some of that after dinner with some banana jam and peanut butter. We girls (and Nathan) shared some of this cake. I ate it without reading the ingredients, knowing that it was probably full of things that "aren't allowed". It was really good - light and fluffy and CHOCOLATEY!! Sure enough though, after we ate it, I read the label and it's loaded with high fructose corn syrup, among other things. Oh well! Too late! It was already in my belly!!

So know we're caught up! Final note for tonight...we're watching the finale for America's Got Talent, and the most original perfomers on the show, and the ones who should have one, in my opinion, just got voted off!!! Check them out!! (the performance starts at about 2:14)



Good night!!