Thanksgiving 2015

So I'm sure you're all wondering how my first low carb/high fat Thanksgiving went and did I stick to the plan. I'm happy to announce that I sure as heck did!

Of course it's not that hard to stay low carb on Thanksgiving because the main event of the meal are pure protein.

But those side dishes!!! Mashed potatoes with gravy, rolls with butter, dressing made with cornbread and/or bread, pumpkin pies, breads, rolls!

Luckily I have help in my WOE (way of eating)! My mom made for me a special low carb stuffing alongside the regular stuffing she made for the rest of the family. As luck would have it I did not get a picture of it, but she took the ground beef she had browned and put about two cups into a separate pan. She added chopped bell pepper, green onion and celery. When I saw what she was doing I gave her a big hug and then I added some chopped cauliflower. She added the chicken broth and when it was almost done I added about a cup of chopped pecans! It was delish and I didn't even miss the bread! It had a nutty rich, crunchy texture and that wonderful bell pepper/celery/green onion taste that I love!

I also made a low carb version of cranberry sauce, this one from Gourmet Girl Cooks. It's a Cranberry Orange Coconut Sauce. Her picture is much prettier than mine, but it still tasted delicious! Some of my family members that swore they did not like cranberry sauce tasted it and loved it.

As I am not one to love feeling left out I made a low carb pumpkin dessert for me to enjoy while the rest of the family enjoyed the regular pumpkin pies that I made. The recipe for this I found on the most awesome low carb site ever!!! Linda's Low Carb Menus or genaw.com

This website is a staple for almost all low carb eaters. I've enjoyed many of her recipes and they always turn out perfectly! The recipe I chose was Jody's Pumpkin Bake and it was better than real pumpkin pie! Again, those that tasted it had a slice of this instead of the regular pumpkin pies I had baked. I added a dollop of whipped cream and then had the bright idea to top it with slivered almonds which gave it a delightful crunch and a nutty flavor!

So these dishes along with some green beans sauteed in bacon fat with almonds were so satisfying that I didn't even miss the rolls or the mashed potatoes. I had planned to make a cauliflower mash but time got away from me and it's hard to make room in a kitchen when there was already so many other foods being prepared.

So it was a great Thanksgiving spent with family and I'm glad I didn't give in to temptation, in fact, I wasn't even tempted! Now we'll see how I cope with Christmas as that is when we make and eat Tamales and it's really hard to find a low carb method of making those since three quarters of the tamale is made with corn masa. But I'm not worried, I'll figure something out!

     

The Pumpkin Patch Finale

As I mentioned on Monday's post; this weekend we visited one of our local pumpkin patches, Murray Family Farms. That's where we saw the peacocks. Now I want to share with you some of the other things we saw.

First of course, here we are at the front door of Murray Family Farms. There were so many people there it was unbelievable! So let's go through those front doors and see what's up in the big red barn. (And don't knock down any of the precious little darlings that are running around everywhere!)

I see you made it through that maze of face-painted, cotton-candy crazed children? Great, so take a look in this case. See all those lovely things? All different kinds of apples, plums, pears and looks like some pomegranate even. Who doesn't love pomegranate right? Anyone want to make me some Pomegranate jelly? Yum!

And what's this? Hmmm, this is new to me, how about to you. No...I don't mean the mini pumpkins and gourds and the Indian corn...it's those little things right above that sign. Let's see if we can get a close up of those.

Yep, I was reading that right...BATMAN MAN WINGS! Not Batman Woman Wings, but honest to gosh darned Man Wings! Wonder why they call them that?

Oh...ok, now I see, do you? Cause they look like Batman's wings...his MAN WINGS!

Ok, well so that was interesting. Lets head outside and see what else we can see.
Oooooooo, Pumpkins! Well I guess that's why they call this the pumpkin patch right?

Awwww, I like the little ones!

Looks like a great photo op here!

And what about this view of the Tehachapi Mountains and the golden colored hills leading the way?

As you can tell by the swaying palm trees....you're definitely in California!

And over here on the other side, you see the kids carnival. There's a wagon ride out to the pumpkin fields so you can pick your own pumpkin if you didn't find just the right one in those stacks and stacks we just saw. There's also a maze, face painting and all kinds of carnival games and food.


And look, farm animals! An old goat! He seems friendly though.

Well hi there Mister Goat. So you don't mind having your picture taken do you? You're not like your friends over there, the shy peacocks from Mosaic Monday?

Awwww, and look...a little baby goat. She eats right out of your hand.


Ok, and now that we have goat spittle all over our hands, lets go find someplace to wash up. Maybe here at this really cute little hand washing station. Isn't this a great little idea? I love the colorful tiles!

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm pooped and ready to head out. We'll head back to the old red barn.

And on the drive out, lets take a drive-by picture of these beautiful flowers. . .

and another drive-by picture of the Cherry Tower.

And let's all wave good-bye to Mister Goat. *waving* Bye-bye Mister Goat!


And that was our trip this past weekend to Murray Family Farms Oktoberfest Extravaganza!
Hope you enjoyed it! Happy Fall!

Linking up a little late to Outdoor Wednesday, but please go over and visit everyone there. Ta-Ta!

Jack-O-Lanterns and other Halloween Displays

I just had to post some pictures of Jack-O-Lanterns and and awesome Halloween display my brother in law Guero did.

First...my Halloween Display. Hey, it's not much but at least I sort of got into the spirit of things! I just have a thing for Wind Socks, I love them. I've had this one for more than 5 years and I have them all hanging in my garage. You'll see them in an upcoming post this next week that I've been meaning to do...but more about that later. Just look for the "Indiana Tata and the Temple of the Garage" post.

Second...my daughter's contribution to my Halloween Display. She carved a pumpkin, but she wasn't going to be home so she gave him to me. The first and second pictures I took in the morning on the way to work. The last picture I took when I got home and it's lit up, but you really can't tell. She also gave me all those cute little ones that I'm going to bring back in tomorrow and put on my table as a Thanksgiving Display. Thanks April, love them!

Third is my boss Michele's Jack-o-Lantern. She bought a special book with templates to create a Jacko that would have a design on the front and then have a carving on the back that would display a shadow on the wall behind it. Did I really think she was going to do it? No, but darn her if she didn't prove me wrong. She did an amazing job and inspired me to try to do one next year.

Lastly is the display my bro in law did. Every year his son Ikie has a party with a few friends and G (when you see G, that means my brother in law), so G grills them up some burgers and dogs and does some decorations and gets them scary movies to watch. Well this year he really out-did himself. He made headstones and he and my sister had a good time thinking up the names on them. They're pretty self explanatory, so just enjoy the pictures!

One other thing G did is he rigged this ghost that was attached in some way with strings and pulleys so that when trick or treaters came to the door he could pull a string and the ghost would glide down to scare the kids. It had a glow stick inside the cloth to give it a ghostly appearance. It was so cool. I don't know where he got the energy and imagination to do all this, but Props to G, he did a great job!

Tis Autumn, Tis Autumn! Oh Joy, Oh Joy!

READ THE BELOW AT YOUR OWN RISK -YOU WILL BE TAKEN BACK IN TIME!

I’m ashamed to say that I wrote this last weekend and just never got around to downloading the photos off my camera. I mean it all still happened the way I say it happened, honest! But it just didn’t happen today. Today it’s going to be about 91 degrees and autumn seems to have disappeared. I’m going to pretend that it’s still autumn though and hopefully by reading the below you’ll also feel all autumny, autumny…is that even a word? Well whatev, let’s fly to last weeks beautiful weekend.

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” --George Eliot

Autumn has arrived in Shafter!! This morning the sun arose to a crisp, clean, clear beautiful day! I opened all the doors and windows and let the fresh breeze just take all those summertime air conditioned airs away!

Fall has also made us more ambitious. Only last weekend I said I was only a Foodie, but this weekend, both my sister and I were cooks…well maybe more like bakers. We both decided it would be a good day to bake.

I decided to bake some pumpkin bread from a recipe from For the Love of Cooking. On my way to the store I called my sis and she told me she was baking Empanada’s. I think she’s a bit more ambitious than me because I’ve never made those and they are way more time consuming.

Here's a picture of her empanadas. Sorry the picture was so blurry, but I suck at photography that way. Trust me, she's a much better baker than I am a photographer...they were really good. She wasn't thrilled with her crust, but I loved it! She's likes crispy crust and it was chewy and breadlike, how I prefer it. She bakes like a real baker, she just throws ingredients in...she doesn't use a recipe!

Right now as I write, the aroma of pumpkin bread fills the air. A fresh breeze is coming in through my kitchen windows and I hear Aerosmith and whistling from outside where my son is cleaning the garage. Pumpkin bread and a clean garage…does life get any better? Well let me tell you…it doesn’t!

Here’s the recipe for the pumpkin bread. It’s really easy to make, especially for like an office potluck, of which I have one on Halloween Day, now I know what to take.

Ingredients:
1 15 oz can pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups of white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups + 1 tbsp of flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 cup walnut pieces

I only added one little thing that wasn’t in the original recipe and that was a teaspoon of vanilla because I love the taste and smell of vanilla.

Here are the directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9x5 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, mix together the pumpkin, oil, eggs, and sugar and vanilla. Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger; stir into the pumpkin mixture until well combined, add walnuts and mix. Pour the batter into the greased loaf pan. Bake in the oven for 55-65 minutes or until a tester comes out clean when inserted into the center of the loaf. My oven took 65 minutes for it to finish.

This is a very nourishing, sweet but not too sweet, tasty bread. I’m a big fan of carrot cake, zucchini bread and banana nut bread, so this bread was right up my alley. Mmmm, this bread in the morning at my desk with a Venti Breve Latte with one Splenda from Starbucks!

Now here are some pretty pictures of the whole thing from start to finish.

1st picture is of the wet ingredients mixed together. What a beautiful color huh? And that's even with the bad lighting in my kitchen!

2nd picture are the dry ingredients...somehow they don't have the same pizazz as the wet ingredients, but there's lots on nutmeggy, clovey, cinnamony, gingery goodness going on in there, it smelled great. I could probably use it as a body powder for fall it smelled so darn good!

3rd picture...the magic happens! The wet and the dry mix together!

4th picture, all the dry is mixed into the wet ingredients bowl a little at a time. This smelled even better than just the dry ingredients alone.

5th picture. See that little gadget there with the gold top? I don't remember where I got this, it could have been my deceased ex-mother-in-law's or I could have bought it at a yardsale, don't know. But anyway, I love it. I always use it to chop nuts and sometime onions. I've had it forever. There's my nuts and I'm going to chop them in my manual food processer (the glass and gold thingy).6th picture. The nuts are chopped, even though it doesn't look like it. This gadget chops nuts up real fine, you'll see in the next picture, but it also leaves some big ones; almost like it knows they're going to look beautiful in the final picture.

7th picture, see how the nuts are chopped pretty finely but there are some bigguns in there too? My food processor is magical! Doesn't this look lovely?

8th picture, the final mixture. All pumpkiny and full of good spicefullness and nuttiness and sugariness and any other nesses you want to think of. I could just eat this with a spoon!

9th picture. My little pumpkin bread dough all tucked into his little bed ready for his little oven spa! In the next picture you can see upclose how good this looks. I thought about spreading the dough out, but wanted to see what it would look like with all the little swirls. Don't spread it flat, those swirls are amazing!

10th and final grouping of pictures...the finished product. Pumpkin bread. See how pretty those big chunks of nuts are in there? And see how pretty those swirls made the top of the bread look? Imma genius! Trust me, this bread is soooooo good and it feeds a lot of people. I had my sister take those first two slices when she brought me her empanadas. Then I cut about four slices for my mom, dad and daughter. Then I cut a couple of slices for me during the week and then I cut the rest up and took them to my mom's house the next day for a bar-b-que and shared with everyone else. They loved it as well. This would be a great Christmas present, or potluck food, or a neighbors gift. Enjoy!