Pumkin Walnut Bread with Cream Cheese Frosting!

We love making bread! Kellie and I had found a pumpkin walnut bread at Williams-Sonoma but it was 10 bucks. We ended up getting it but wanted to find a recipe that wouldnt cost more than a few dollars and that was equally delicious. I found this recipe online and it turned out to be wonderful!

Pumkin Walnut Bread Recipe:

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup sugar

1 tsp bakng soda

1 cup pumpkin puree

1/2 cup olive oil

2 eggs beaten

1/4 cup water

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp allspice

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Method: Preheat oven to 350. Sift together salt, flour, sugar and baking soda. Mix pumpkin, oil, eggs, water and spices together. Then combine with the dry ingredients. Do NOT mix too thoroughly! Stir in walnuts.  We doubled this recipe and that worked out well! Pour into a well greased loaf pan. Bake 50-60 minutes.

Cream Cheese Frosting:

8 oz cream cheese

3 tbsp salted butter

2/3 cup sugar

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

Blend until creamy and smooth 2-3 minutes.

Homemade Applesauce

This is a fun treat for the cool fall weather. The tempurature is dropping and this applesuace tastes great warm as well as cold. Its super easy, just a bit time consuming with all of the apple peeling. All you need is about  8 cups of apples. We used the Gala and Granny Smith apples, 4 of each. An apple slicer works great if you have one, but cut into about 6 pieces, and peel the skin off. It didnt come to mind at all when I was making this, but use an apple peeler too to help with the time. That would have been so much easier!  Put into a microwave safe bowl. Pour 1 cup of sugar on top of the apples along with 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tbsp lemon juice, 2 cups of water. Then, you put it in the microwave for 10 minutes, then stir, put it back in for 5 minutes, then stir and finally 5 more minutes then stir one last time and mash apples with a potato masher. Who would have ever thought? Those things are so useful! Cool in the fridge for a couple hours and you have applesauce! It sure beats any store bought applesauce and doesnt have any added junk to it.

Chicken with Tomatoes, Onions and Olives

We ended up cooking a lot this week on our days off. I wanted to make a few things since its been awhile and we came up with this recipe along with a few others that we made. For this recipe, it only took about 30-40 minutes. All the ingredients were very simple and it seemed to turn out like a mediteranean dish. I added some cilantro into a basmati rice and juice from maybe about half of a

lime for our side dish. this one was a keeper! Yummo!





October Surprise Date Night

We've decided that once a month, we are going to take turns planning a date night. This month, we went to one of the parks off Ken Caryl to play a couple of rounds of frisbee golf and then went out to dinner at
 Pei Wei- thee best asian "fast food". Although its not technically fast food but for those of you who have been to Noodle's, its basically the same style. Order, sit down, grab drinks and they bring your food out within 5-10 minutes. Its pretty awesome stuff and Ryan has never been there. Ive been wanting him to
 try it for awhile now and we finally got the chance. Its a pretty scarce restuarant around here so I was pretty excited to find one not so far away! Here's what we enjoyed for the night :)

Zucchini Breads

This morning Kellie and I spent about 3 hours in the kitchen making two different kinds of zucchini bread which turned into about 6 loaves of bread! She had gotten this insanely large zucchini and needed to do something with it before it went bad. The first one we made was the same as grandmas chocolate banana bread only instead of the bananas we substituted zucchini. The second one we did was Ryans moms recipe....

Jackie's Zucchini Bread:

3 eggs, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup olive oil> mix well

add 2 cups of grated zuchinni (cheese grater works perfectly), 3 tsp vanilla,

3 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp baking powder, 3 tsp cinnamon,

1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional) also, we added about
1/2 cup mini chocolate chips for fun! (optional)

Grease two loaf pans & flour them so that the bread won't stick.

bake at 325 for about an hour. We baked at 375 for about 35-40

minutes because of the high altitude. Cool 10 min before removing from pans.

Homemade Pizza

This is mom's recipe for pizza dough. We always bought the Pillsbury dough in a tube but nothing compares to homemade!!!

For Two Medium Pizzas:

1 1/2 cups water

3 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp salt

2 tsp sugar

4 cups flour

4 tsp quick-rise yeast

Let rise in bowl for one hour. Then cut into two pieces and roll out with floured rolling pin to fit the size of each pan. Grease pans with olive oil (the Misto sprayer is our new favorite kitchen tool for olive oil), and sprinkle with yellow cornmeal. Then lay dough onto pans and layer with pizza sauce, cheese, and your choice of toppings! Our favorites are pinneapple, pepperoni, sausage and mushrooms.