Welcome to the holiday season....

Hope everyone had a great thanksgiving!  We had quite a feast over here, I made....

Scones for breakfast
Ciabatta bread
Warm brie with pepper jelly
Candied walnuts
Parker House rolls
Noodle kugel-family recipe
Mashed potatoes
Vegetable pot pie -- I pretty much just eyeball this when I make it, but here is a general recipe
Turkey
Pumpkin pie

On top of that, our guests also brought a couple dishes--it was awesome! 

I just started a new retail job which has been crazy.  It was ambitious of me to decide to host thanksgiving, but on top of that I decided to make everything from scratch.  I don't know what I was thinking!  Looking back it would have been a lot less stressful to just buy a loaf of bread and some rolls at the store... oh well!

We also had a small, but exciting fire when I tried to brown my meringue for the pumpkin pie

Haha!  The best part is that after scraping off the charred part, the pie was amazing so my only advice is to use a culinary torch and nothing else ;)

I also wanted to post that before Thanksgiving, Dano and I made a roasted cauliflower soup that was delicious!  Neither of us even really like cauliflower so I decided to make this soup to use a bunch up from our CSA and we licked our bowls clean!

I used vegetable broth instead of chicken broth and didn't measure the nutmeg, just grated the seed over the cauliflower until it looked well covered.  And I don't buy garlic powder, just chopped some garlic up and added it to the cauliflower when there was only like 10 minutes left for it to roast.

where did the month of October go?!

Now that I am back in the world of modern conveniences, I am hoping to update much more often! 

Fall just might be my favorite season to bake--it's nice to have the oven warming up our apartment and I love baking with pumpkin and apples!  I like to bake with actual pumpkins and I'll do a post on that later but this week was a canned pumpkin kind of week...

I was anxious to get baking once I moved back into our apartment and one of my favorite fall recipes are these pumpkin cookies.  I used half brown sugar and half white sugar and I have been buying whole nutmeg seeds lately and grating them myself.  It adds much more flavor!  With all glaze recipes, be sure to check the consistency of the frosting--it's hard to measure confectioner's sugar accurately so take a spoon and make sure it will adhere and not just drip off.  I added cinnamon to the glaze and made it pretty thick so I could use a cake decorating bag to ice the cookies.

Yum!