pumpkins and pumpkin spice cookies

Good morning 

Below are some cloth pumpkins that I made yesterday, for my daughter at her request.  

They are circles, with a running stitch pulled up, then stuffed with polyfill. 

The stems are made from strips of brown fleece, tightly rolled and hot glued.  

If you want to make pumpkins but don’t want to sew or can’t sew, I found this really cute and simple method to make pumpkins from old clothing items. 

No Sew pumpkins by Fresh Vintage 


Below is our front porch, decorated for fall.  

The mum has lots of buds but they aren’t opening.  If they don’t open soon,  I’ll take them back to Lowe’s.  

Here is the recipe I used for Pumpkin Spice cookies, if you’re wanting to do some fall baking.   It’s a cookie recipe I’ve baked many times.  They are great made with just vanilla and they taste like fall when the DIY Pumpkin Spice is added.  

Chewy Oatmeal Cookies

1 C butter, softened (I use real salted butter, not margarine or spread for baking)

2 C brown sugar, packed

2 eggs

1 t vanilla (I omit this when adding pumpkin spice) 

2 1/4 C flour 

1/2 salt

1 t baking soda

1 t baking powder

3 cups of oats- rolled or quick- both work fine 

Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric  mixer until smooth.  

Add eggs, one at a time and beat to combine. 

Add vanilla and/or pumpkin spice as desired and beat about a minute. 

Add flour, salt, baking soda and powder. Beat at low speed until combined. 

Add oatmeal and stir until combined. 

Now preheat the oven to 350.  

Line your cookie sheets with parchment. 

Make large balls with dough, I use a 2 ounce cookie scoop. 

Put dough balls on cookie sheets about 2 inches apart.  Slightly flatten each ball, use your fingers or the bottom of a glass. 

Bake about 12 minutes, or just until set.  

With a 2 ounce scoop, one recipe makes 3 dozen good size cookies. 

DIY Pumpkin Spice 

3 T cinnamon

2 t ginger 

2 t nutmeg ( I left this out because my nutmeg didn’t smell right)

1 t cloves

1 t allspice 

Mix together and keep in a tightly closed container.

I added a little more than 1 T to the oatmeal cookie recipe.  Yes, I know eating raw eggs in cookie dough is a No-No but I tasted the dough before I baked it and after adding more spice,  I think a slightly rounded T of spice mix is just right.  

Happy Fall Y’all 

🍁🍂🐿🍂🍁

Peppers and tacos and cookies

Hello, on my to do list was to deal with a bunch of jalapeños my husband grew.  

For some of them, I used my friend Dawn’s recipe.  

Dawn’s freezer jalapeño poppers

I think these will be so nice to pull out and bake some whenever we like.  

With the rest of the jalapeños, I found a very simple candied jalapeño recipe and did that to the rest of them. 

Candied jalapeños are really good on a cracker with a smear of cream cheese.  

Supper was lentil tacos in crunchy shells with naked okra.  


My grandsons that live on a farm gobbled up the lentil tacos.  In fact the oldest grandson ate 4. 

He is not a picky eater but he never mentioned anything about the lentil tacos being different from the beef tacos he has always had before.  

I really think the lentil tacos would appeal to anyone that likes tacos.  They are seasoned up just like beef taco meat.  

Gavin and Braeden really do live on a small farm.  Their daddy has beef cows and their momma has dairy cows. The boys help with both.   

This is one of their guernsey calves right after they showed her at our county fair.  

Yesterday, I baked 2 batches of cookies.  Most of them are for this weekend’s cookout.  

I used this recipe for the chocolate chip ones except I used semisweet chocolate chips and I made mine just regular cookie size 

Cookie Madness

Cookie Madness is a great blog, written by a regular mom who won the Pillsbury Bake Off maybe 10 years ago.  She bakes lots of cookies and other desserts and you can trust her recipes and advice.  

The other is a recipe I’ve used for lots of years but I added homemade pumpkin spice blend.  They have no real pumpkin in them.  

That’s what’s been cookin’ here. 

❤️

Hello ——-To do list, CVS deals, no meat recipes

Good Monday everyone

My husband was out of town for a few days, helping his family in Arkansas.  

He brought me these pretty yellow roses ❤️

And if you look in the background, I did order more fabric and sewed a curtain for the dining room window to match the bench cover. 

Here’s my to do list for the week.  I didn’t decorate it this time.  

Even though it’s plain, it will help me stay on track.  

I’ve gotten back into weekly couponing at CVS.  

It does take planning, as many things do, and I think it’s very worth my time and fun too. 


Above is what I bought this week.  It was $109 before all deductions and just $22 after deductions and I got a pile of CVS extracarebucks to spend next week.  

Below is how I planned out my purchase plan.  I clipped the items I wanted to buy  from the sale paper and glued them onto a sheet of paper. 

This makes it easy to spot the correct item in the store. 

I try to always buy items that are on sale, offer extracarebucks, have coupons and if possible, also that I have CVS personalized coupons for.  Personalized coupons, called CRTs in couponing lingo, are coupons that print from the CVS red box or at the bottom of a CVS receipt.  

I also only buy items I know we will use, but I made a slight exception to that this week as I got some new vitamins that were free after coupons from Sunday’s paper.  

 Below I did some rough figuring to determine the actual amount I should spend.

It was pretty close,  I guessed $25 and it was a little less.  

The deductions circled in green are paper coupons either printed from coupons.com or from the newspaper. 

The deductions in Red are CVS CRT coupons, app coupons and extracarebucks from last week.  See how quickly they add up? 

Next week, I’ll start with $31 in CVS money.  


Meal prep

3 grands spent the night here this weekend, so before they came, I did some meal prep. 

In the crockpot Lentil Taco filling is cooking.  I mixed up pancake batter for breakfast.  It’s always nice to have a salad in the fridge. 

For fruit, I cut up a watermelon and put it in 2 containers and the rest is on the divided tray with plums and strawberries.  



I am still eating no meat and I like it just fine. 

I hesitate to call it vegetarian as I have used a few animal products we already had on hand when I started leaving off the meat.  And we definitely are not eating Vegan. 

Lentil Tacos are one of my favorites 

Slow cooker lentil tacos

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup brown lentils, rinsed 

1/2 t garlic salt

1 T chili powder

1/2 t oregano 

2 t cumin

Black pepper as desired

1 can of green chili and tomatoes- Rotel, 10 ounce or so (I used Aldi ones) OR 1 cup salsa 

2 cups water

2 bouillon cubes- vegetable bouillon would be vegetarian but I used chicken as that’s what I had 

Put all the ingredients in a slow cooker, stir, cover and cook on high 4 hours, until the lentils are tender. 

I had to add about a cup of water halfway through.  

So plan to check on the lentils a couple of times during cooking.  

You want the lentils to cook and not dry up but the finished dish should not be juicy.  

My crock pot cooks fast and yours may not cook as hot as mine.  

I served these on lightly fried corn tortillas with traditional toppings like onion, tomatoes, lettuce, salsa and sour cream.  It would be good in crunchy shells or flour tortillas too.  

While the flavor is almost identical to beef taco filling,  the texture is different.  

I don’t think you can fool anyone with this but they really are so good.  

We like them a lot and they are very easy and thrifty.  

One batch of these made enough filling for 3 meals of tacos for the 2 of us, making 6-7 tacos each time.  

Black Eyed peas are another favorite.  

Black eyed peas 

2 cups dry BE peas, washed and drained

1 diced onion

3 celery stalks, diced

1 1/2 t paprika

1 t thyme

1 t parsley 

1 t oregano

1 1/2 t Cajun seasoning like Tony Chacheres 

1 T dry chicken boullion- I would use vegetable to be vegetarian but I already have this in my pantry 

If desired 1 t Tobasco

Put all in a slow cooker and cover with water and another 2 inches or so

Cover

Cook on high- in my crockpot it takes 4 hours 

Serve with hot rice 

I made it simple batch of lentil soup but it was very blah.  I plan to try a more spiced up version next time. 

We also really like red beans and rice with no meat.  I’ll share that recipe soon.  

Today, I’m cooking a batch of refried beans in the crockpot and will serve them with quesadillas and green salad.  

We’re not eating meat but we aren’t eating anything people would call too weird either.  

Have a good week everyone ❤️