Blooming!

I'm very excited--in the summer of 2007 I took some cuttings from one of my Grandma's and one of Fred's Grandma's Christmas cacti. They didn't bloom last year, but at least some of the cuttings are blooming now. I guess that at least one of the cuttings is from a Thanksgiving cactus, not a Christmas cactus.


We've been busy lately. Last weekend we flew to LA for Fred's friend Josh's wedding. It was a nice wedding, but a tiring weekend. We both had long weeks at work, so it was nice to have a relaxing weekend at home. We did some errands, ordered our Thanksgiving turkey, and did a little bit of work around the house. Last night I used some of pumpkin puree I made last month to make a pumpkin bread recipe that I'd been wanting to try. (If you look up the link--I made the yeast bread, not the Trader Joe's version, although I made that a couple weeks ago, and it was easy and tasty).

Anyway, the recipe made enough for two loaves. We only have one bread pan, so I made one loaf and used the rest to make pumpkin cinnamon rolls. They were really good--one of the best batches of cinnamon rolls I've made from any recipe.

Fred liked them too. He pretty much likes all cinnamon rolls--except for the first batch I ever made for us. I made the mistake of baking them in one of my stoneware baking dishes that I'd used previously for a beef roast. Unfortunately, that left an unpleasant beefy taste in the cinnamon rolls. I've learned to only use that dish for savory dishes and use Pyrex for desserts.

Cooking for fall

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen today--by choice. The weather was very fall-ish, so I made a big pot of chili for dinner and to last us through the week. This is my second pot of chili in less than a month. Fred makes fun of me because I'll only make it in the fall and winter (and probably well into the spring here, since it stays rainy and cool into June), but to me chili just doesn't seem like summer food.

I also roasted some butternut squash and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes are for making biscuits, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the squash. I have about 6 cups of mashed pumpkin and squash in my freezer, but when I see it on sale I feel like I need to get more to stock up. I'll be able to bake a lot of pumpkin/squash bread through the winter.

I made a batch of the sweet potato biscuits to go with dinner tonight, and as always they are almost gone. I found this recipe last year after Thanksgiving when we had some leftover roasted sweet potatoes. If I remember correctly, they are excellent with cranberry sauce, but they're great by themselves. The recipe is modified from a Paula Deen one from the Food TV website. I consider it healthy, since it only has 1/4 cup butter in the whole batch (if, like me, you don't brush them with butter after cooking).


Anyway, if you're interested, here's the recipe:

Sweet Potato Biscuits
Makes 8-12

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 heaping tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup mashed cooked sweet potatoes
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) softened butter
2 to 4 tablespoons milk (depending on the moisture of the potatoes)
2-3 tablespoons flax seed (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, mix the sweet potatoes and butter. Add the flour mixture to the potato mixture and mix to make a soft dough. Then add milk a tablespoon at a time to mixture and continue. Be lazy like me and drop spoonfuls of batter onto your baking stone, or be like Paulal and turn the dough out onto a floured board and toss lightly until the outside of the dough looks smooth. Roll the dough out to 1/2-inch thick and cut with a biscuit cutter. Bake for about 15 minutes. (Watch your oven: If the biscuits are browning too fast, lower the temperature.)