Just another Sunday night

Finally, I have accumulated enough photos for a blog (well I guess I could have done multiple posts but I was lazy).

My days off now are Wednesday and Sunday, so that puts a slight limit on how complicated or long my recipes can be. I sorta feel like I am outta practice! But 2 Friday's ago, after arriving home from work, Mike and I decided to head to WalMart to pick up a few essentials. Having no dinner plans and not wanting to spend money on going out, I browsed their food section and found day old Cubano bread. Cuban sandwiches tonight! Now granted they were not like my Grandma made them (rest her soul), but they had the basics all Cuban sandwiches should have:

I do not have a flat press, so I had to use my indoor grill (what do you call those things? They look like George Foreman grills, but they are a different brand). They were so good!! I didn't realize how much the bread makes the sandwich. I have had "Cuban" sandwiches in the past that didn't use Cubano bread and they pale in comparison. Next time I will make them just like Grandma did.

6 cans of pumpkin fill my cupboards and I was trying to use them in ways that weren't pumpkin pies. I found this recipe and decided to try it:

Sorry the picture is blurry. It was quite good and an interesting take on coffee cake. To top the whole pumpkin day off I made pumpkin spice lattes in the slow cooker (sorry the pictures of it did not come out very good). I am still apprehensive about trying a recipe with pumpkin that isn't sweet, but I need to since I still have 5 cans left!

With all these decadent foods I need to be running (well I am, I am training for another half marathon). While Mike and I were out running one night we were talking about chocolate chips cookies his mother used to make paired with ice cream. All the talking about cookies made us hungry so when we got home I started the ice cream maker (sorry, no pictures) and made some chocolate/butterscotch/white chocolate chip cookies:

They were so-so. I am still not used to butterscotch chips in cookies, maybe I need to try them in a different cookie recipe.

Like I have said before, chicken leg quarters are really cheap at Aldi. So after removing the skin from some pieces, I decided to make chicken and dumplings from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook:

Oh, it was so good! Homemade gravy and homemade dumplings, so delicious! And I made it lower calorie than what the original recipe called for, so seconds aren't too bad for you.

While I was at the grocery store I thought to myself "We haven't had homemade pizza in a while". So I picked up some fresh tomatoes and some mushrooms. I even made dough with yeast it in (unlike my yeast- free, quick dough) and then I realized, I forgot to buy mozzarella at Aldi. Fudge! Here's what happened:

My half had no cheese, but Mike decided to take what was left of the Havarti cheese in the fridge and covered his half in it. It was still pretty decent without the cheese, but next time I won't forget!

After working a open to close shift on Thursday, I came home to Mike making dinner:

I had purchased potatoes, celery, and carrots at the store the day before, so Mike wanted a bisque of some sort. He make potato bisque with chicken. It was really good! He thinks I didn't like it since I added a little Molly McButter to mine to add a little more butter flavor, but I really did. And I am always happy when he makes dinner!

Tonight's dinner was nothing fancy. I just mixed some steamer clams I got at Aldis with some vermicelli, but it looked pretty with the clam shells:

The lime garlic sauce the clams came in was really good too! And believe it or not, the sauce (per the package label) only had lime juice, garlic, corn starch, salt and spices in it. Not too bad.

Until next time, please enjoy this photo of one of my babies Charlie wearing all the "booty" we got at Gasparilla yesterday: