Pumpkin Beer Mini Round Up

Let’s be real – this post isn’t for you guys, it’s for me.  I needed a list of pumpkin beers to reference when I freak out next season because the first squashy brew has hit the shelves.  Posting to the blog means that my personalized list will be readily pulled up on my cell phone.  I promise the next post will be for you!  Please do make recommendations in the comments though.

love it – must buy again

ACE, Pumpkin Hard Cider  {#3}

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Blue Moon, Cinnamon Horchata Ale (no, there’s no pumpkin, but this ale deserves a mention)

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Great South Bay, Splashing Pumpkin (pumpkin ale)

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Harpoon, Pumpkin Cider

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Harpoon, UFO Pumpkin

Ithaca Beer Co, Country Pumpkin (pumpkin ale)

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Rogue Farms, Pumpkin Patch Ale  {#1}

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Southern Tier, Warlock (imperial pumpkin stout)  {#2}

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like it – could take it or leave it

Elysian Punkuccino (coffee pumpkin ale)

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Naked Flock, Pumpkin Cider

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hate it – do not buy again

Captain Lawrence, Pumpkin Ale

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Flying Dog, The Fear (imperial pumpkin ale)

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Magic Hat, Wilhelm Scream

What are your favorite pumpkin beers?

Insta-Wrap-Up; IX

I have no Webster love to share this edition, I feel like a terrible dog mom!  If I don’t take pictures on the regular, how will people know that I have the cutest boy on the planet?  Anyway, here is some of what I did instagram…

I can’t believe I never shared this recipe on the blog, but I made a pumpkin mug cake and it was fantastic!  Just the usual recipe with 1/3 cup pumpkin subbed in for butter.

pumpkin mug cake

During Pumpkin Month, Halloween nails.  I did clean up the edges a bit after that picture!

crackle nails

Spotted on a taco stand in Brooklyn –

te amo brooklyn

This made me laugh so hard.  Also, do you use The Skimm yet?  It’s a week-day email service that gives you a quick, comprehensive overview of current events.

the skimm

And I may not have gotten the dog on candid camera, but I did show off this adorable dachshund ring that my cousin sent me.

dachshund ring

Sorry, Webs!

Weekend Top Three

{1} I made my Buffalo Chicken Baked Pasta.  But I made this version cheesier.

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Like, soooo cheesy; I accidentally spilled in most of the bag of cheese when I meant to do an extra sprinkle.

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I also added more buffalo wing sauce, a bit more spinach, and swapped in whole-wheat pasta, ranch, and lean ground turkey for chicken breasts.

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It was delicious.

{2} We soothed our fiery mouths with pumpkin beers.

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All four ended up being fantastic.  I wasn’t expecting to love the ales because I tend to prefer stouts and ciders, but they were some of the best pumpkin brews of the season.

{3} I found on-point bubble tea right next to my work.

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One of the doctors told me about it and I might have to give her my firstborn.  Awesomely chewy boba and tons of flavor options (they even had pumpkin!).  Shown above is strawberry rose black tea with tapioca and rainbow jelly.

Weekly Wrap Up

As of this morning, the cold of winter is finally here. Ugh. But I had a good final week of thin hoodies and no gloves. Good eats too! I did a lot of train eating – bars for breakfast, guava cheese empanadas… – but the LIRR was too packed for stealthy photography. Here’s what I did capture…

breakfast {coffee, coffee, coffee}

Never hot, I don’t care if it drops below zero, you can pry my iced coffee out of my cold, dead hands.

Chameleon cold brew with the last of the honey almond milk, which I loved.

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Espresso! With milk and sugar.

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I tried the chestnut praline latte from Starbucks. I really liked it.

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Marshmallow cold brew.

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lunch

Turkey, sharp cheddar, and pumpkin butter sandwich on a pumpkin spice English muffin.  With an apple and bbq chips.

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Plus the last cookie.

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Maple raisin oatmeal with a red pear.

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And an afternoon treat of Turkish coffee that a coworker brought in.

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Dannon Creamery cherry cheesecake (yum, much better than the strawberry!) with chopped strawberries and blueberries. TJ’s kale chips. I passed the kale around the breakroom and my coworkers all said they might buy some themselves.

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Dannon Creamery vanilla pudding with strawberries, plus the last of the kale chips and bbq chips. This was the best store-bought pudding I’ve ever tasted. And Adam stole the milk chocolate pudding and loved it.

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I tried, and did not love, the new Coke.

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dinner

When I got home on Monday, dinner was waiting in the crockpot for me.

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Chicken with bbq sauce, smoked brown sugar, and fresh cranberries. I ate mine on a big bed of spinach.

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We had salted caramel cheesecake and a yummy pumpkin beer for dessert.

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Pizza and salad.

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A giant bbq chicken slice from Pinos. The crust on these is amazing, super fluffy and light but still crunchy.

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Plus Whole Foods hot bar – garlic broccoli, pickled cucumber, and salad with veggies on top.

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We also got hot chocolate that we’d been excited about all week – supposedly it was made with ganache – that ended up being a big cup of hot milk.

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You cant win ’em all.

No Sleep Till Brooklyn; Weekly Wrap-Up

Oh my gosh, Brooklyn is so freaking great!  <– I could probably just stop here, that pretty much sums up the salient points of this post

I was a little all over the place this week so I don’t have a ton of pictures to share, but Adam and I did go out to two amazing dinners that I need to rave about.  Other than that, I have about 30% of breakfast/lunch/snacks.

The husband worked several overnight shifts this week and I took advantage of my alone time by making the super adult decision to stay up until 3am on a work night catching up on the entire new season of “Criminal Minds.”

life

source

Here are some snippets of cafeteria breakfasts…

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That second thing was some biscuit/pastry Western omelet hybrid.  Strange, but not bad.

And of course, there were many {many} coffees.

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Yogurt bowl lunches…

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KIND Banana Nut Clusters with my blackberries and butterscotch peanut butter with my raspberries.

And snacks at my desk…

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I also bought the new peppermint cookie chocolate bites from Starbucks and they were great.

Now on to the good stuff, two amazing, fantastic, fantasmic, socks-rocking dinners in Brooklyn!

#1  Berlyn

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This space was gorgeous.  I couldn’t get any good shots of the décor (or the food for that matter!) but our table felt like it could be sitting in a clearing in some German forest.

I ordered the Hemingway Daiquiri and it ended up being the best cocktail I’ve ever been served.

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The menu listed Caña Brava Rum, Luxardo Maraschino, grapefruit juice, and lime juice, but I swear that I could also taste cinnamon in there.  I liked it so much I kept us out late ordering a second round after dinner.  Adam’s beer was amazing as well; I don’t remember it’s name but it positively reeked of honey.

We shared a house-made pretzel to start,

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which came with the best honey mustard I’ve ever tasted.  <– noticing a theme here??  I wouldn’t say that Berlyn is the best restaurant I’ve ever been to but many things on their menu were certainly the best ever in their categories.

Adam ordered pork schnitzel for his entrée so I decided to try two small dishes.

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Potato pancakes that came topped with smoked trout and pickled cucumbers.

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And fried Brussels sprouts with a pine nut aioli.

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Best fried Brussels sprouts we’ve ever had and the aioli was seriously indescribably good.  Adam and I both were gasping at how yummy it was.

The dessert course didn’t sound quite as terrific to us so we headed over to Four & Twenty Blackbirds for the best espresso in Brooklyn.

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And came home with slices of pie to eat in front of “Brooklyn 99.”

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My salted honey slice was legit.

#2  Thistle Hill Tavern  <– from the owner of Talde and Pork Slope

I ordered a New Old Fashioned, which was made with Four Roses, Laird’s Applejack, maple bitters, lemon,  and brown sugar.

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So good, though bourbon is always good.

I started with the Kale Taco Salad.  Kale dressed in salsa verde with cheddar, spicy pickled vegetables, and a fried tortilla.

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This was the best kale salad I’ve ever eaten (<– I’ll stop now, promise!).

Dinner was the fish and chips with their famous salt and pepper fries.

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I don’t know why I keep ordering fish and chips because I never eat much of the fried fish, but this was definitely the best version (sorry!) I’ve ever had.

Adam swooned his way through a slice of maple bourbon pumpkin pie,

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but I held out for the best ice cream in the world, Ample Hills.

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Good God.  “No Sleep till Pumpkin” = coffee ice cream with pumpkin gooey butter cake and underneath was “PB Gets Fluffy” = marshmallow ice cream with chocolate flakes and homemade peanut butter cookie dough.  Just fabulous.  Neither of us could believe how good the pumpkin coffee flavor was.

What is the best restaurant in your city?

Best Pizza Ever; Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Halloween!

Things were busy, busy, busy, busy this week at work.  <– if you don’t read that in the voice of the magician from “Frosty the Snowman” then you didn’t have a childhood and you need to go rent the movie immediately!

As I’ve mentioned, my clinic is transferring over to an electronic medical record system at the end of this year.  The nutrition department needs a new charting form (built from scratch) to accommodate our specific patient population, but since I am the entire department things have been pretty hectic.  Plus we are in the middle of planning a big event and I randomly had a bunch of newly diabetic patients this week.

Additionally, I do some consulting work on the side reviewing nutrition educations and I had a big batch of articles to get through this week.  I really enjoy the work – did you know that I did some editing/reviewing for a famous Caribbean author as a child? – but it can be hard to get motivated to get myself back into work mode once I’m home and changed into Adam’s sweatpants at the end of the day.  Snacks help.

My meals were all totes amaze this week and/but you will see quite a bit of repetition…

breakfast

Vega Peanut Butter Cup Bar and an orchard apple.

breakfast

Iced coffee with chocolate soy milk and an apple.

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Orchard apples and espresso with milk and sugar.

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The energy shot in the middle was a sample from my Urth Box and it was a giant nope.

lunch

Yogurt bowl.  It’s funny, at least once a week someone will comment about how good my yogurt lunch looks.

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Dannon Pumpkin Pie Greek with fresh blackberries and TJ’s Pumpkin O’s.  Plus a candy corn salt water taffy.

Take-2.

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With TJ’s pumpkin Greek and Pop Rocks.

Dark Chocolate Mint bar from Zing.

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This was all I had time to eat on Thursday but it kept me full all afternoon.  Thanks, 10 grams of protein.

snack time

Lindt’s “Hello My Name Is” bars are pretty much my favorite.  Cookies and Cream!

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An “Apple Pie A la Mode” = honeycrisp apple cider + RumChata + Goldschläger.

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Locally-made yogurt.

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Trying to bribe myself into doing my freelance work, I … stole some of Adam’s Cheetos (we both are a little bit insane about themed foods),

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Ate licorice bears,

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And dipped a big, sliced apple into butterscotch peanut butter.

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The apple dippers beat out my other snacks in nutrition and flavor.

dinner

We made Rachael Ray’s Pasta with Pumpkin and Sausage using this fun pasta as our base.

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We tend to rarely repeat recipes but this is one we’ve made several years in a row now (back in the day!).

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So good.  I subbed TJ’s soy chorizo for sausage and fat-free half and half for cream but otherwise followed the recipe.

Round 2.

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I made a big bowl of leftover pumpkin pasta and leftover white cheddar macaroni with spinach, topped with chunky cranberry apple sauce that one of my nutrition co-workers made for me.

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Adam was not willing to put fruit on his pasta, but my bowl was delicious.

Pizza Night!

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Ugh.  These came out so flipping yummy and neither Adam or I could shut up about it.  We loaded them with ridiculous toppings and they probably ended up being far more caloric than delivery but they were also the best pizzas we’ve ever eaten.  We used a ball of dough from Trader Joe’s and it split perfectly into two nicely sized pizzas.

Traditional – marinara sauce / low-fat shredded mozzarella / sautéed green pepper rings / tons and tons of mushrooms browned in butter.

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Plus, slightly less traditional.

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Oh yes, you know I went there!  The best pizza I’ve ever eaten ever including the amazing, giant slices of Buffalo chicken from Zetti’s – pumpkin puree / low-fat shredded mozzarella / TJ’s Pacific Rock cheddar / onions sautéed with liquid smoke and smoked brown sugar / tons of crumbled turkey bacon.

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Plus we had sautéed kale on the side, with liquid smoke, maple syrup, and more bacon.

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For nutrition.

We also shared a Warlock.

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Best of the season!  There wasn’t actually much pumpkin flavor, this was just a really delicious stout.

Round 2.

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Leftover pizza.

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Kale chips with truffle salt and roasted broccoli with bbq.

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The pizza was just as swoon-worthy eaten cold.  How do I get more, immediately?  And we ate this while watching “Nightmare Before Christmas” so I was pretty much exploding with excitement.  <– picture strange, giddy laughter and me singing along with my mouth stuffed full of pizza.

What was on the best pizza you’ve ever eaten?

Apples All Around; Long Week Wrap-Up

We have been enjoying the heck out of my apple picking haul.  There were a few days last week when I ate an apple with all three meals!  Too bad my husband’s a doctor, I don’t want to keep him away!

I haven’t blogged a recap since last Sunday so I’ve got quite a bit to share…

breakfast

An apple and a latte.

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Round 2; this was homemade cold-brew with Hint of Honey Almond Breeze.

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Then the next day I did skim milk and maple syrup.  Also delicious.

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An almond croissant with more coffee.

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Latte from David’s Tea while we walked around Park Slope.

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Cream of Earl Grey is the best.

lunch

Sandwich and salad day.  I think this is the largest lunch I’ve ever packed.  A pumpkin spice English muffin (<– oooh!) with pumpkin butter, roasted turkey, and sharp cheddar.

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Spinach salad with blue cheese, dried blueberries, sweet and spicy pecans, and honey mustard dressing.

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Oatmeal and an apple.

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I’ve decided that I hate that line of Quaker instant oatmeals but it was already waiting in my pantry so I gussied it up with chia seeds, butterscotch chips, and dried cranberries.

Pumpkin yogurt bowl.

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Pumpkin Chobani with TJ’s Pumpkin O’s amd butterscotch peanut butter.  Plus an apple, of course, though that was actually a SweeTango from a grocery trip before I had my orchard haul.

Cafeteria day.

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Salad bar and baked onion rings.

Sunday brunch at Talde.  There was pickled ginger in my Bloody Mary.

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We also shared a French Press of Illy.

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Fried avocado bao to share.

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And Korean chicken wings with waffles for me.

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With coconut brown butter, yum!

snack

An orange selection.

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Sweet stuff.

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Pumpkin Noosa with butterscotch peanut butter.

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Duh.

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TJ’s Cookies and Cream Butter.  <– ahhhhhhhh

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This jar lasted Adam and me less than a week!

dinner

A roasty fall meal.

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Squash with cinnamon and smoked paprika.  This was our first try roasting kombucha and it was good, though not quite worth the hype in my opinion.

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Asparagus sautéed with Bone Sucking mustard sauce and sliced almonds.

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And a big slice of my cheesy eggplant bake.

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We made this version in a pie dish and with mozzarella instead of provolone but it still ended up being delicious.

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With Naked Flock pumpkin cider to share.

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My co-worker brought me back the cider from the orchard where she went apple picking!

Leftovers night.  Eggplant bake side-by-side with tuna casserole, topped with additional cheese and crushed Cheez-its.

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I know that looks like a giant bowl of melted cheese, but I swear the layer underneath was mostly veg.  Plus we did salads for some green.  Spinach, chopped carrots, and edamame with sesame soy ginger vinaigrette.

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And a totes amaze apple cocktail.

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Honeycrisp cider with Apple Pie Moonshine.  I also did a splash of Goldschläger.

Chipotle.  Let’s be real, we got rice bowls two nights in a row.

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We shared some pumpkin brews to keep things fall-ish.

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Soup’s up.

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The TJ’s pumpkin soup was too thin and basically inedible.

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But my sides were awesome.  Three cheese grilled cheese = sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and blue cheese on wheat bread.

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And sliced apple.  I’m sure you’re not surprised that I ended up dipping my slices in melted cookies and cream butter.

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Mac and greens (and cheese!).

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Standby spinach salad – with dried blueberries, blue cheese, lavender salt, evoo, and honey – on the bottom.

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And mac and cheese – Pirate’s Booty aged white cheddar mac with tons of spinach, extra cheese, and Sriracha – on top.

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Adam hates when I pile things on top of one another but mac and salad go together really well.  You should try it!

What was the best fall flavor you had this past week?

Apple Picking; Weekend Wrap-Up

This weekend I got to cross something major off of my fall bucket list – apple picking!

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I drove upstate to Lawrence Farms with some girlfriends and we came home with pounds and pounds of tasty apples.

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I also snagged Adam and I two pumpkins for carving next weekend.

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Check out my gorgeous haul (this is only a portion of it, the rest went into the fridge) –

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So far, my favorite variety is the Candy Crisp.

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Yum!  We had a ton of fun and I definitely want to repeat this activity next fall.

I don’t have much to share for this post, just three things.  I’m a bit under the weather and I spent almost all of Sunday tucked in bed.

Breakfast on the go.

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A smoothie  – water and meat from a Thai young coconut with canned pumpkin, pumpkin pie spice, frozen banana, and maple syrup – and a Clif Maple Nut bar that I shared with the husband.  The bar was much better than the smoothie, which did not emulsify at all.

Getting in my green before a dinner of orange hues.

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Spinach salad with sweet and spicy pecans, dried blueberries, and buttermilk blue cheese, dressed with honey, evoo, and lavender salt.

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The oil came home from Italy with a friend and it was fantastic.

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Our main course was tuna casserole that I made and froze awhile back, so I don’t totally remember what was in it.  Definitely tuna, barley, spinach, green onions, peas, water chestnuts, roasted garlic and mushroom condensed soup, cheese, and crushed Cheez-Its on top.

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Plus carnival squash that we roasted with salt, smoked brown sugar, liquid smoke, and maple syrup.

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Dinner was delicious.  Sweet and smoky squash with cheesy casserole?  You can’t really go wrong!

Best bite of the week goes to dessert from Ample Hills.

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I got a kids’ cup of pistachio and honey and the flavors went together perfectly.

Hopefully I am over the hump with my sickness now.  The temperatures are finally dropping here and I really don’t want a cold to go with the cold!

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