Pumpkin Chili!

Been meaning to write a post for a while but life got hectic! So here's a little of a catch up post. Been busy in the kitchen again, and we were craving some chili. I've cut back a lot on meat so he was ok with a vegetarian chili. I made this one before but it's been quite a while and I should make it more often, it's so good!

I got this recipe from my cookbook called Thug kitchen. I found the recipe online as well, and I absolutely love their cookbook, and their website is just like their book and I love it. Check out the recipe here.

I also saw a post on Facebook from Joyous Health about a London Fog latte and I had to try it, and glad I did, it was so good!

I did use my frother for the almond milk but I find when using almond milk it doesn't froth up very much but still turned out delicious! I had that with sprouted bread toasted with peanut butter and banana, it was one really yummy breakfast!

We also had a beautiful Saturday a few weeks ago so I went for a nice long walk and it was great! We have some snow now so trails would be wet so I'm glad I went when I did

 Last weekend, my friend and I decided to do some baking. We made biscuits and sugar cookies

The biscuits are two different recipes. The ones on the left turned out better. Not that the ones on the right are horrible, they just taste a little doughy.

For the sugar cookies, we are not experts in decorating them but they are delicious which is what counts! lol

 

This weekend is great so far. Last night, Friday, my dad and his girlfriend came over, and we did a little shopping in stores, of course wearing masks and being as careful as possible. My dad is almost done his Christmas shopping now. I only got a few gifts, so I finished my shopping a little in stores, just hit 2 stores quickly and the rest was online. So now just have to wait for a few deliveries, and wrap up gifts and I'm all set! I usually don't wait this long to shop but with Covid I wasn't sure how to go about things. I'm hoping I won't get gifts delivered late, but we will see.

So after our shopping yesterday, we came back here and I got supper ready, we had roasted chicken, which the chicken was spatchcock so it would cook faster, and I put the chicken and rib rub from Epicure with some white white at the bottom and it turned out delicious! We also had a garden salad, mashed potatoes and gravy. We played some cards after, so it was a great day. With more shopping today, and I did some laundry, now time to relax tonight, and glad we still have another day to the weekend.

My kitchen

In my last post, I mentioned about ordering a moveable island cause my kitchen is small therefore not a lot of counter space to work with. Here's what it looks like in my small kitchen

Yes I have a lot of stuff on my counter top as well, but I love to cook and bake, and I don't have a lot of cupboard space either.

 I have used the island a few times but yesterday was the first true cooking and baking day that I did. It was a lot of fun and it helped out so much to have more space to work with. So the first thing I got started on was chopping up some veggies to roasted them in the oven. I used an entire butternut squash and chopped it into chunks, and then a small yellow onion, 3 shallots, and 2 carrots chopped as well. I took an entire garlic and roasted that in foil in the oven as well. I added just a touch of salt and lots of pepper and olive oil and roasted them at 400 for a half hour. In a pot I added 1 cup of lentils with an entire carton of vegetable broth and once it was boiling I turned off the heat and let it cook completely. Some of my herbs are still surviving outside so I grabbed some rosemary and thyme and chopped that up finely. I added some grated nutmeg and put that aside. In my food processor I added the roasted veg with the lentils and broth in two batches to get that all pureed. You can do this in a blender as well, which would probably turn out more smooth, but I had my food processor out so why not. And then added my herbs and some pepper and warmed it all up along with another carton of vegetable broth. Here's how my butternut squash soup turned out

It turned out really good! We both enjoyed it for lunch, along with a sweet potato biscuit, which I found the recipe on Joyous Health, and you can get the recipe here

Mine turned out darker then hers cause I used buckwheat flour. These turned out really good as well. Buckwheat flour is quite strong in flavor so I would love to try these with spelt flour or whole wheat flour to see how they taste. All the herbs/spices in these are delicious! I used fresh rosemary for mine since I have lots in my herb garden.

I also wanted to make a healthy snack for us, and I saw another one of her post's a while back and I have been wanting to try it. So I made her chocolate chip banana bread. This also turned out really good!

I made the recipe exactly how she has it, however instead of just chocolate chips, I also added in some walnuts for a bit of crunch. I skipped the slices of banana on top and shredded coconut. I do love coconut but wasn't feeling like having any in this. I never thought either to put cinnamon in a banana bread but I like it. We both really enjoyed everything I made, and we of course have left overs for the week. I plan to freeze a jar of my soup to have at a later time, and I do still have some for this week as well.

I have been doing horribly in staying away from meat and dairy lately, and I have been getting some endometriosis pain, so I'm going meat and dairy free for a while so I can feel a lot better. I do fine with seafood so we have some salmon we will enjoy for supper tomorrow, and we have some shrimp in the freezer as well. Tonight's supper will be the sweet potato pad Thai, which I have already shared this recipe in a past post, you can view it here.

Hope everyone had a safe and wonderful Halloween