Halloween at Work

This was my 2nd Halloween at work and we do a safe house trick-or-treating event for kids and show Halloween cartoons. This time it was "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" I love it...

This is the group of candy givers, minus the werewolf. I LOVE the costume on the far right!

 

Here's a close-up...LaDonna on the right, Fallon on the left.

 

Nichole and Mae! Nichole is a volunteer and Mae works at the park next door.

 

...and I came up with a real costume this year too. It's mostly from stuff I already had in my closet. The gold earrings came from the dollar store and the boots came from the thrift store in Yerington for $2! At least it's better than the footie pjs I wore last year!

 

Out of Pumpkins (Fall Cooking Part 2)

Well... I finished my 2nd batch of pumpkin-chocolate chip muffins and they worked! The first batch I don't think I added enough cinnamon (and pumpkin pie spice) but for the 2nd one I added a little more cinnamon and ginger.

 

I still have some cooked pumpkin left so I'm going to look for a pumpkin bread recipe to use up the rest of the pumpkin and the chocolate chips. Then I can go buy another pumpkin or two, and start over!

I'm sure I posted this link somewhere on here but I couldn't find it. Here it is again: the BEST (healthy) muffin recipe I've ever used. The recipe is for carrot-spice muffins but I've used the same basic recipe (wet and dry ingredients) to make different kinds of muffins including apple/pecan, cranberry-orange and pumpkin! I even used it once to make blueberry muffins for Dave...but his review was: "These would be great with chocolate chips instead of blueberries!" This time I subsituted pumpkin for applesauce and the yogurt. I ended up having to add 1/4 C of milk for more moisture but it worked great otherwise.

If you try these let me know what you think!

Fall Cooking

Today was my last of 3 days off this week so instead of moving...like I was supposed to be doing...I ended up cooking ALL day! I keep buying squash and pumpkins because it's fall and I like them, but I decided I should actually do something with them instead of letting them just go bad!

This is butternut squash soup. I would normally cook everything together and just puree it, but Dave likes "chunks" in his soup, so I baked the squash and pureed it. I roasted an onion, potatoes and sweet potatoe in the oven, then decided roasted garlic would be good too. I roasted four cloves of garlic for about 10 minutes and took them out of the oven. One clove decided to explode, so I had garlic all over me. I'm not sure where the rest of it went!

 

 I added the garlic, then added roasted potatoes, onion and sweet potato. I also added parsley, more garlic, salt, pepper and paprika...and half a jalapeno just for a little spice. I liked it a lot but it seems like it needed something else. I'd bought frozen rolls to go with it, but then discovered (when we were almost ready to eat) that it takes 1 1/2 hours to bake the rolls. I think those will be for tomorrow night.

 

I had bought a small pie pumpkin so today I decided to make pumpkin pie(s). I found a recipe here for how to make pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin instead of a can. I used this same recipe last year and it worked great. Once, I made pie from a butternut squash just to try it out and it was pretty good. I don't think anyone knew the difference!

 

I cooked a pumpkin a while ago and froze it so I could use it later (what I really wanted from it was the seeds...). I thawed it out today, planning to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins but I left the muffin tin at the other house (6 miles away). I decided it was worth it to make the trip for the pan, got home to make the muffins and discovered the flour and other ingredients were still at the other house. At that point I gave up and decided to make them tomorrow night after work!

 

I love Fall! I even bought pumpkin beer to go with everything.