This Week's Eats

It was a very pumpkin filled weekend around these parts: pumpkin muffins, pumpkin carving, pumpkin coffee and even pumpkin pancakes on Sunday.  I used my banana pancake recipe, substituting pumpkin for mashed bananas and adding pumpkin pie spices - sooooo good.  I also succumbed to these:

Great in hot chocolate, coffee or on sweet potato bars.

Another fun fall thing I've discovered is that steeping my cinnamon hibiscus tea bags in apple juice tastes like fresh apple cider and is perfect with a splash of honey and lemon.  Speaking of fall food tidbits, this soup went over quite well last week, with a few additions: a 14 oz can of diced tomatoes, about a half cup of ditalini pasta and my favorite secret ingredient: a rind of Parmesan cheese.  We always buy the fresh stuff from Whole Foods (once you do, you can never go back) and grind it in our Cuisinart.  We keep a Ziplock bag of the rinds in the freezer to pop into soups while they simmer.  Sooooo good. 

• Monday - chicken club salad with guacamole dressing NOT PIZZA! Ermagherd! We got lazy yesterday after spending much of the evening at the Y's Halloween party and decided on Chipotle for dinner, so this got pushed back to Monday and we'll do what most good Americans do on Halloween night: eat pizza.
• Tuesday - spaghetti with broccoli cream pesto (finally trying this Smitten Kitchen recipe)
• Wednesday - Halloween = Pizza!
• Thursday - buffalo turkey burgers with blue cheese slaw (trying another Skinnytaste recipe)
• Friday - baked chicken taquitos with lots of guac, salsa and sour cream
• Saturday - spaghetti bolognese (from Dinner, A Love Story)
• Sunday - crock pot chicken enchilada soup

PS - hoping to have my Snohomish River Run recap done by tomorrow; finish time was 54:24 and I had mixed feelings about my 10K "PR"  More later...