Sausage and Pumpkin Pasta

Continuing the pumpkin theme with fall cooking, I stumbled upon this Sausage and Pumpkin Pasta by Rachel Ray.  When I saw it pass the Pinterest feed, I said, hmmm, that sounds good.  Turns out I am getting a lot better at picking out winning recipes.  The bonus to this recipe is that it was from one of her 30 minute meal episodes.

I do want to comment on the set of instructions that were provided.  I consider myself a pretty decent cook.  Not much intimidates me from a recipe with the exception of how long it will take, but that's a recent development thanks to kids.  I do remember spending 3 hours in the kitchen one Saturday many many moons ago making the most delicious stew, but that's something I just can't do these days.  That aside, I still have things to learn.  I am gradually working my way to not necessarily always needing to measure things exactly.  If you have ever watched Rachel Ray cook, you know she's not big on using measuring devices most of the time.  In this recipe, I liked the side note for how much cream to use - 1/2 cup (about 3 turns around the pan).  So, instead of measuring, I just did 3 turns around the pan and I'll be darned if that didn't seem to be about half the container which I know is a cup.  Level up on cooking skills!

I think the only real edit I made to this recipe might have been the amount of sage they called for and what I used.  The recommended 2 tablespoons fresh and I had dried.  The bottle said 1 teaspoon dried = about 2 teaspoons fresh which would have meant using 3 teaspoons worth.  I used two rounded teaspoons worth and thought that was plenty.  Also, I couldn't find "sweet" Italian sausage, so I just went with a pound of turkey sausage.  In my head I was telling myself it was healthier.  Didn't adversely affect the taste at all (well what would we know? It was delicious the way we had it).  We have a great turkey burger recipe that calls for sage as the main spice, so the flavor combination was already a proven success.  If you wanted it to be even healthier, you could use whole wheat pasta and use half and half instead of heavy cream.  While we are health conscience, we let our taste buds have a little fun, so we did not make those substitutes.

I also made the salad that went with this and it was delicious!  I didn't have a golden delicious apple, but the Macintosh I had was scrumptious all the same.  I edited the prep/serving of this because I don't like pre-dressed salads and it was meant for 4 people which would have translated to soggy leftover salad with browning apples.  Yuck.  Instead I just made the salad again the next night.  The pasta was awesome on leftover night too.  Definitely going to be a staple rolling forward for our fall recipe rotation.

Rainbow Whirls

In my free time (ha!), what little there is, I enjoy sitting at the sewing machine and creating quilts.  Mostly I am doing baby quilts due to the rash of friends having little ones, but I someday envision a time where I actually make a bigger one for people to use when they are curled up on the sofa or one for our bed.  In the meantime I get a lot of practice on technique and picking fabrics.  My latest finished quilt took a lot time to get together.  Not because it was hard, but just because it was one that didn't have priority to be done for a baby shower. :)

Of course I have an inspiration board on Pinterest for quilts and one of those pins spurred the thought behind this quilt.  When I set out to do this, the person having the baby didn't know if was a boy or a girl.  I was looking for something to do in rainbows.

Thankfully, the Missouri Star Quilt Company put together this fabulous tutorial on making pinwheels.  I have such a hard time with triangles, so this video gave me the boost of confidence in finding a "cheat" to making pinwheels so I just went for it.  I think it is the best way to make them, especially if your whole quilt is pinwheels.  You can basically make whatever size you want and just roll.  As a side note, the lady that does these tutorials is great.  I have watched a good number of them and they are excellent.

I am pretty pleased with how this one turned out.  It's colorful and pops.  Not to mention it was fun to make.  I had a small learning curve to learn that it mattered how I assembled the pinwheels together.  My seam ripper and I bonded just like always.  I swear, one of these days I'll get through a project where I won't need it.

It was shown off to the whole family and everyone ooohed and aaahed over it.  I just hope the little man who ended up with it loves it just as much. :)

Online Yard Sales

Let's face it, Craigslist is a menagerie of sketchy miscreants, flaky individuals, and the occasional honest and normal person just trying to sell or buy something.  Not only that, but the posting for an area like Northern DC can be a dice roll.  Oh hey, great deal on a dresser, but it's on the other side of the city.  Forget it.  I know you can search, but the amount of filters you need to apply just to find what you are looking for can be annoying.  Not to mention you have to continually check back and apply all those filters each time.

Facebook has it's ups and downs, but the most recent useful thing I have found it can do is bring local people together to buy and sell things in an online yard sale group.  There are a bunch of these all over the place for people to buy and sell in a town.  The rules are usually that you need to be willing to meet in that location or be in an adjacent location.  This kind of eliminates the searching of things for sale in my area.  Not only that, it pops into my news feed AND 95% of the posts have pictures.  To boot, you can often tell if an item is for sale or has interest from other people thanks to the handy comment feature.  Sure there's a lot of crap I don't want, but given all the other junk in my news feed, I really don't mind.  And if I wanted to, I could set it to not show in my feed and just browse it when I wanted to.

We are on a new kind of budget system and so catching deals from people that are selling what we are looking for is ideal.  Some of the things I have been able to snag at really good prices (or free):

Two Target bags of sleepers for 2T girls - Free
Little Tykes Car (Flinstone Car - Older Model)  - $10
Melissa and Doug Fire Truck Floor Puzzle (like new) - $5
Snap and Go Stroller for Graco car sear - Free
Garbage Ball full of assorted girl clothes - Free
Two lamp shades - $7 - This completes a ridiculously long project, not that it was hard, just took forever to do.
Pair of shoes (Franco Sarto wedges, actually in my size) - $5
Dress - $4

I fully intend to pay it forward with passing on these items I have gotten for free to other people in need.  The Snap and Go Stroller has been the most useful win since our other stroller is a Bob (bought from Craigslist), and is way large to shove in a car if you want to cart anything else with you.  All in all though I have made out pretty well.  One lady was having a moving sale for a while and I swear almost everything in her house was for sale and for cheap!  I ended up acquiring 4 fabric bins (couldn't find purple in the stores and wanted them for my daughters room), a purple rug, a kaleidoscope, a pair of Mary Jane clogs, and a paper cutter for $21.  I was ecstatic.

I have only had one bust and that was from a lady selling step stools.  When I got to her house she couldn't find them.  How that is possible I am not quite sure, but whatever.  I guess we will have to buy those from a store.  They are needed for potty training and those would have been ideal.

For all the other grief and eye rolling Facebook can something cause, I think the online yard sale is a pretty awesome feature.  If you don't have one for your area, you should put a group together and see how it goes!

Sunday Morning Pancakes

Our Sunday morning tradition is to spend most of the morning in PJs and eat pancakes.  We have a homemade recipe for pancakes I make in bulk and then just make batches every weekend until it's empty and refill.  Being that it is fall and I am on a pumpkin/chocolate chip kick, it was totally a sign when I saw a recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Pancakes on Pinterest.

It took a bit more effort pre-coffee to make which is kind of a big deal when you have a toddler "helping" you.  It used all of my measuring cups and spoons and dirtied far more dishes than our typical Sunday morning treat, BUT I think it was worth it.  I am not one for saying pancakes don't really need syrup, but these really are good on their own.  To me, pancakes are the vehicle to eat syrup because taking shots from the bottle is kind of frowned upon by health experts.

Anywho, these turned out fluffy and delicious.  They took a bit longer to cook because the batter is so thick, so by the time I got around the eating my pancakes, the rest of the family had finished theirs.  (I eat mine from the last batch).  The recipe actually made about 16 pancakes by my 1/4 cup portions, so we have plenty in the freezer for any other fall weekend we want these but don't want to put the time in to achieve the desired results.

Thank you fall for inspiring wonderful flavors into regular meals.  We will be trying a Pumpkin and Sausage Penne Pasta later this week too.  :)  Could be delicious!

Grilled BBQ Chicken and Pineapple Quesadillas

We are always looking for something new to try at dinner. Bonus points if it's easy and possibly could be tailored to get a toddler to eat it. I saw this recipe on Pinterest and thought, huh, that does sound delicious!

The recipe!

I have never grilled pineapple before but thought it had potential. I started with a misfire getting to grill properly lit (I still have no idea what happened exactly), but once I got going, there was no stopping me!

This recipe come together fairly easily and is customizable to your taste preferences. We had Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce on hand (who doesn't?) so we used that for the chicken and as some added flavor in the quesadillas. We opted to skip the jalapeños but I am sure they would have been delicious too. I did devour at least half a "stalk" of the pineapple we grilled. We should have had more cheese on hand, but I was impressed we at least had the monetary jack the recipe suggested. Just not as much as we could have done.

Verdict: We absolutely need to do this one again. The toddler even looked the pieces of it (just not all together).