Happy Thanksgiving Part 1

Monday: A Leftover Concoction with Salad
Tuesday: Chickpea Salad with Pitas
Wednesday: Salmon Dill Pasta
Thursday: Curried Veggies with Dhal
Friday: Prawns, Roasted Potatoes and Veggie Squash Bake
Saturday: The Night Hawk
Sunday: Pizza, Salad and a Jets Game

A Leftover Concoction with Salad

"Harper do you think you'll be brave enough to sit on Santa's lap this year? You need to sit on his lap and tell him what you want for Christmas."

The girls were playing dolls this morning and out of the blue Hannah puts on her sticky sweet voice and asks Harper about Santa. Harper just stared at her, like she was weighing if she would still get to participate in all the Christmas festivities if she decided not to sit on Santa's knee. Finally she said, "Yes."

It was one of those beautiful days today, the sun was shining and you could have worn shorts if you so chose. I love fall and one of the reasons that I love it so much is that I don't have to wear shorts, so I chose not to. The girls had a great day together, they played in the backyard for hours without fighting or hurting themselves, there wasn't even any playing in the mud. I was at a loss, I actually kind of wondered from room to room half doing things. It's not that there aren't a million things to get done in this house, it was just such unexpected free time that I was so unprepared...but it was still lovely.

Recipe
How do you use up a flopped risotto recipe? Add lots of stock and make a sauce for it. There was too much left (surprise, surprise) to throw it away so I made a tomato sauce, added in the leftover eggplant balls and crumbled in the two leftover black bean patties...it was actually quite tasty, but it did kind of look like ground beef.

Tomato Sauce
1/4-1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes
3 cloves of garlic, pressed
Olive oil
1 tsp oregano
28oz tin of whole tomatoes

In a pot heat a good glugg of olive oil and saute the garlic, hot pepper flakes and garlic for a minute (not letting the garlic burn) add the tomatoes, bring to a boil and then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. After the 20 minutes, break up the whole tomatoes (I use kitchen scissors) and crumble in the black bean patties and add the eggplant balls.

We also had a salad with my favorite dressing from this post. In the salad we had pea pods, arugula, cucumber, tomato, apple, raisins, pecans and sunflower seeds.

Chickpea Salad with Pitas

There's something about the quiet of the morning. I rarely get this, because I love my sleep so much and so if the kids aren't up, neither am I. My children do get up at five in the morning, make their way into our bed where a) Harper nurses back to sleep while Hannah cuddles in close to Dave and we all fall back to sleep (this is like winning the lottery over here and is fairly rare) or b) Harper nurses while trying to run all over the bed and ends up kicking anyone and everyone, no matter how far they may think they are, Hannah cuddles up to me on the other side of my body where I'm left half on my side, half on my back in agony but with the hopes that maybe if I stay this way everyone will go back to sleep and revert to scenario a, this never happens, but yet I'm always hopeful or c) Harper nurses for a short time and declares it's morning by yelling, "I going to get my bekfest!" Dave or I stumble after her half asleep wishing the coffee was ready to go while Hannah and the lucky one left behind sleep until it's actually time to get up. I think since Hannah's been born I've gotten one or two mornings where I'm the first one up to welcome the day. I have time to wake slowly, drink a cup of coffee, listen to the house and all within peacefully sleeping...it's a good place to be.

There's nothing like big sister's tap shoes.

Recipe

This is a standard in our house and I love it. Sometimes I make it exactly like the recipe, other times I make do with what we have or add things here and there. Tonight we used goat cheese instead of feta and I added chopped olives to the mix, don't skip the mint it really makes this salad. The recipe is in this post, sometimes we have it as a salad but mostly I like it in a pita. Tonight we added a little cucumber on the side.

Salmon Dill Pasta

Something is happening, I can feel the shift. Hannah is again playing on her own in her room. I think that maybe she's not use to all the socializing she gets at school and needs just a little quiet alone time when she gets home, but it sure feels like she's turning into a big kid. I know that's crazy, right? She'll stay five forever. I'm not scared...maybe a little...

Dave's company is moving his department to Calgary and so he'll be looking for a new job soon. Hannah was asking him all about it tonight. She needed to know all the details about how we would move to Calgary (which we're not). "How would we get all those boxes on the airplane?" Dave explained about moving trucks. "Which way would the moving truck go? Which neighbor would it go past, the one on the left or the one one on the right?" Dave answered about twelve questions, I wonder how many there would be if we were actually moving.

Recipe

This recipe was inspired by this one at epicurious but I didn't actually have most of those ingredients. This one turned out really good and everyone gobbled it up although, I'm in no way saying it tastes anything like the one that inspired it.

1 large fillet of cooked salmon, we did ours on the BBQ

3/4 lb of pasta, cooked

Olive oil

1/2 red onion, chopped

1/3 cup white wine
3 cups veggie stock

1 cup sour cream

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cornstarch

1 1/2 tsp lemon rind

2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

2 Tbsp capers

Salt and Pepper to taste

In a pot heat a glugg of olive oil and saute onion until soft. Add the wine, veggies stock, sour cream and salt and bring to a boil. Boil for 40 minutes to reduce and then sprinkle in a little cornstarch and whisk to thicken. Add in the lemon rind, lemon juice, capers and season with salt and pepper. In a large bowl or platter scrape in the sauce and flaked salmon and mix, add the pasta and toss until combined.

We had this with kale chips found here.

Curried Veggies with Dhal

The weather has been unbelievably warm for October, plus 30 the other day. The girls have been soaking it up in the yard playing until bedtime. I love cuddling up with them in bed and being able to smell the outdoors on them. We have this playhouse in the backyard that was a gift from friends of ours that stayed with us this summer. It's brilliant, the girls love it and play in it for hours at a time. Hannah often plays on top of it, she can easily climb to the roof and stands or lays up there while Harper climbs through the windows and passes things up to Hannah. It has never really been an issue until as I was getting dinner ready and I looked out and saw Hannah on the roof, Harper standing on the window with her arms stretched up and Hannah had a hold of her wrists and was pulling her up in the roof. I didn't want to call out the window and startle them and have Hannah let go of Harper so I quickly made my way out to the playhouse. By the time I got out there Harper was sitting on the roof with Hannah. I very calmly (I'm practicing that Grace under pressure thing...more on that another time) took Harper down and explained that if you are not able to climb up on your own than you are not able to be up there. This actually seemed to make sense to both of them and we had no further incidents. I think (or hope) Harper was a little uneasy up there and this will no longer be an issue.

Recipe

We had some leftover curry in the freezer from this post over rice with raisins and coconut. As much as I stress about stuff in the freezer it's so great when you can just pull out a healthy meal and eat it with no fuss.

Prawns, Roasted Potatoes and Spaghetti Squash Bake

Harper's already asleep, it's 6:45 I think we may be up early tomorrow. I'm sitting on the couch listening to Dave and Hannah play chess. Yes, I said chess, Dave has been slowly teaching Hannah how to play. He also taught me when we first started dating...I think that Hannah may be picking it up faster than I did. She just informed Dave that she's going to take one of his guys but she's not telling him who, it's a secret. As a parenting team he and I each have our strengths, this kind of thing is definitely one of his. I taught the girls how to play Candyland, that was more at my patience level.

Recipe

My brain has been mushy the past couple of days and I have been forgetting things...o.k. maybe I always forget things but it has been mushy, I forgot to take a picture. I really hate it when I forget and the meal before was a repeat with no picture. Oh, well.

I marinated the prawns in a little olive oil and garlic and then strung them on skewers to grill. I also sprinkled some of that Old Bay Seasoning on them (seriously it's like the salsa verde of the fish world).

I roasted the potatoes in the oven at 400F cut up in cubes and tossed with a little olive oil.

Really good friends of my parents make this great squash recipe. I can't recall it exactly but it's what inspired this. I do remember them saying that the key is to saute the veggies separately so that's what I did.

1 spaghetti squash

1 onion, chopped

1 zuchini, chopped

2 cups mushrooms, sliced

I roasted the spaghetti squash whole, pierce it all over with a fork, at 350F for an hour and half. Once it was ready I scraped it into a baking dish. I sauteed the onion, zuchini and mushrooms (each separately) and mixed them with the spaghetti squash, topped it all off with a little grated Parmesan and roasted it in the oven until warm and the cheese was melted.

Just to note that Hannah had Dave in check and on the run and she killed his queen.

The Night Hawk

I love the cottage, I am so grateful for it. It is funny because there's a time that hits in the spring where I can't wait to get out there - it's all I think about. Then in the fall it's like we almost abandon it, I can never really remember when the last we were out was, nor did I know then that it would be our last weekend out. We drove out for the day today to close it up. The kids were really excited to go out and we were happy to be able to go out and close, it was our first time closing. On the way out Hannah had to go to the bathroom, funnily enough this is only the second time this has happened since going out to the cottage. We stopped at Falcon (about 10 minutes aways from the cottage) and I thought that the grocery store and all were open until the end of this weekend but they were already closed. I'd never been there when it was all closed down. Luckily there was a public bathroom open and Hannah crossed the road together to get to it. It was a little windy today and brisque, it felt like fall, not like the hot weather that we have been having the past little while.  I have to say that it was very beautiful and extremely eery. Usually when we're there, there are people walking, biking and driving everywhere. We didn't see a soul, not one person until we were walking back to the car and there was this one truck a little ways off and I picked up the pace. It looked out of place and creepy in the deserted area that we'd had to ourselves a minute ago and as silly as it was my heart raced as we got closer and closer to the car and I could see the truck getting closer and closer to us. Once we were finally inside I quickly (and quietly so no one noticed and thought I was crazy) locked the doors as we got our seat belts done up. It's funny how fear can sneak up on us sometimes (irrationally) and change the perspective of something for us.

Recipe

We stopped at the restaurant near the cottage on the way out. The girls had been so patient and good playing by themselves while we cleaned up and brought stuff in, we finally put a movie on for them while Dave shut the water off just before we left. They were then equally good in the restaurant, we were almost that creepy family (the one where you're sure that the children have been drugged) except for a little walking around and of course the loud voices that are simply excited and very hard to contain.

Pizza, Salad and a Jets Game

We took the kids on a walk with my mom to take some family pictures this morning. It was a beautiful fall day. We've had some really hot weather lately, I'm not complaining - when you live somewhere that gets to be minus forty in the winter you take all the hot days you can get, but it had been at the cost of fall weather which is my favorite. I love the crispness of the air. The area we walked in is all treed with a river running through it. Most of the leaves were down and so they were crunching under foot and the smell of wet earth mixed with leaves filled the air and just put me in a good place. My mom took almost 300 pictures of us and the kids, we just looked them over quickly I'll have a better look tomorrow and share. When we came home we had pumpkin pancakes for lunch. I've been craving something pumpkin and couldn't wait for tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast.

The recipe is from The Curvy Carrot and they were lovely and fluffy and just what I wanted.

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup skim milk
1 cup pumpkin puree
4 large eggs, separated
4 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.

In a separate bowl, combine the milk, pumpkin puree, egg yolks, melted butter, and vanilla extract together, mixing well until smooth.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, mixing with a spatula until just combined.

In another small bowl, using an electric hand mixer (or whatever you have on hand), beat the egg whites until thick and stiff. Gently fold the egg whites into the pancake batter, mixing until smooth.

Dave cooked ours on the griddle on the BBQ.

We went to my parents for dinner and had pizza and salad and watched the season opener Jets game. They lost 5 - 1 but you know, it really doesn't matter. They lost and still got a standing ovation at the end of the game by the fans. We were all just so happy to be watching our Jets again!

I hope that you had a great week. We'll be celebrating our Thanksgiving tomorrow at my aunt's with a very large group, we're so lucky to be surrounded by so many wonderful, loving people. More on that next week.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all, I hope the sun shines down on you.