Weekend Mirths

This weekend was much too fleeting, probably because we were so busy.
Some highlights:

• Cleaning house- this is actually a highlight in my book because there are few things so enjoyable to me as a clean house. I love how it just feels, not to mention looks.


• Going to the grocery store and picking the most perfect pumpkins-almost already too cute to carve.


• Renting "I Am Legend" and watching Jeffrey get up and jump/dance around at the really intense parts


• Sharing Sunday dinner and a Sunday evening chat with our buddy buddies, the Coons'


• Getting a new Kitchenaid mixer from my mama (an early Christmas present)! I couldn't help but break it right out of the box and put it to work. "What did I make with it?" you might ask, well let me tell you:

Some really, really tasty chocolate chip cookies which may conclude my search for a go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe (go-to, because I'm convinced there are just too many recipes and too many taste variables to have a "best ever" chocolate chip cookie. But don't get me wrong, these are darn good.) Cookie recipe here.

Down home biscuits. I didn't really believe that the Kitchenaid could cut butter into flour like my Jeffrey can, but oh, it did. I served these up with some honey butter:

Recipe for 2-4

2 T. butter

1 T. honey (maybe even a bit more, I like a relatively even honey to butter ratio)

Whip, whip, whip

Sweet potato, potato, and carrot mash-but I have made this before and I prefer this mash without just potatoes and carrots. It is seriously so good. The sweetness of the carrots and flavor of the sweet potatoes blend seamlessly. It is so much better than mashed potatoes. Love love love. The original recipe is here, but this is what I like to do:

Recipe for 2

Wash, peel and halve 1 large sweet potato, and 3 large carrots (carrots take a long time to roast, so to make sure nothing gets burned, I cut off the skinny skinny bottoms of the carrots and didn't roast them)

Place in a baking dish and roast in a 375 Fahrenheit oven for about 45 minutes, or until tender and a fork slides through carrots and sweet potatoes easily.

Put carrots and sweet potatoes in Kitchenaid and turn mixer speed to 4-this will give them a rough mash. If you don't have a Kitchenaid, you can use a potato masher (the hand-held kind) or even a fork. Next, whip the mash together with 2 T. butter and 2-4 T. half and half. I used a blender for this and it was a bit tricky and time consuming, and I wish I had a food processor...

When they are all blended together and nice and creamy...go ahead, enjoy them!

This weekend I also got in some non-textbook reading. I'm dabbling in "The Five People You Meet in Heaven"-so far, pretty good. It's interesting and has some great one-liners packed with insight, and I'm intrigued about the ending.

Jeffrey spent most of his weekend writing a program for his computer programming class. It's fun homework to him and mind-blowing to me. He really is quite good at, which is no surprise when he explains that it is all about problem solving- he is really good at problem solving. Trust me. I know.

photo courtesy of allrecipes.com