Red & green and real good dinners...

While to or not to decorate for Christmas yet looms large in hearts... and hearths across the country, I wanted to pay homage to red and green but in the context of fall beauty not as the quintessential Christmas colors. A couple of weeks ago, I took some pictures of the one tree in our front yard (there are only two...) that hasn't lost its leaves yet. The colors were stunning, and I enjoyed taking the pictures and doing a little bit of editing them to make them (the pictures!) extra crisp and colorful.

I was just outside yesterday- Monday the 18th- and the tree that I photographed still has many leaves on it. The leaves look like they are all red now. I am glad that I took a few minutes to capture the reds and the greens a couple of weeks ago...

I also wanted to share a few meals we have been eating and the recipes for them.

1. Pizza- 

I have mentioned this before, but many Friday nights we eat pizza for dinner. Obviously not every Friday but enough that I do consider Friday to be pizza Friday. It's kind of nice to have a default meal for one of the evenings. I have shared the recipe for the homemade crust that I make here. 

Homemade pizza crust

The hardest parts about homemade pizza are allocating enough time for the dough to rise (though not sure it is even necessary since the end product (the crust) is flat?). Nonetheless, I do have my dough rise for an hour. So the crust does take a little planning. The next hardest part is stretching the dough onto pans. I have gotten pretty adept at it because I make pizza often enough but sometimes I have to start over when things are starting to go sideways...

2. Chicken Pot Pie-

I wondered what Alyssa's first requested homemade meal would be on a break from college. I found out when Alyssa was here for the long weekend break in early November when she came home to vote. It was... chicken pot pie. No big surprise as she loves this meal (as do I!). 

For my cpp, I make homemade crust. I think store bought tastes good and I would not hesitate to use store bought in a pinch... or if I did not have a great homemade pie crust recipe, the making and eating of which reminds me of some of my best times growing up and eating my mom's fabulous sweet pies and cpp made with her homemade pie crust.

I wrote a post about my mom's pie crust recipe- homemade pie crust recipe

For the chicken pot pie, "innards" as I refer to them (though filling is probably the more common name for that which is in between two luscious layers of crust), I use a modified version of this recipe from Allrecipes. I say modified because I only follow this recipe very loosely, but it is more or less the ingredient list for what I make. I make much more filling due to Donnie not really caring for the crust of ccp and therefore not wanting to eat the excess calories of the crust. Fair play to him- what I do is make more filling and then serve Donnie the filling as a soup- that's sort of what the filling is. He gets the chicken/veggies/broth/ a la a chicken veggie soup and Alyssa and I get more chicken pot pie with our favorite part- the crust. So it works out well for all of us :).

Looking a little worse for wear, but it tasted really good!

3. Apple Gouda Sausage Pasta-

I tried a new recipe recently and it was a big hit for Donnie and me. Not sure if I will make it for the girls when they are home on winter break. It's kinda heavy- but very good. Very fall or comfort food like if you will. It is called creamy apple gouda sausage pasta and I got the recipe from here.

I followed the recipe very closely except for one big change- I used chicken breasts instead of sausage. I had some breasts in the fridge that needed to be used up soon and I didn't have any sausage thawed. After cooking the chicken, I did shred it with my KitchenAide to make the pieces small and more ground up-ish. I also added some Italian seasoning since the recipe called for Italian sausage.

Even using lean chicken breasts instead of sausage, the meal seemed a bit heavy- gouda cheese and heavy cream will have that effect, I suppose! Add in pasta and well, you can't convince yourself that you have eaten something super healthy. But it's hearty and I do love combining fruit with meat. 

It was fairly monochromatic- it didn't help that the apples I used were yellow

This was after I added the pasta- the pasta helped maintain its near colorlessness

4. Chipotle Honey Chicken and Rice

The next new recipe that I tried was a winner and it was much healthier than the one I just mentioned. It's from Half Baked Harvest and it's called chipotle honey chicken and rice. I didn't deviate from the recipe much at all except that I added more veggies :).  The only veggie that the recipe calls for is zucchini and I still had garden grown zucchini so it was fun to use that. I also had an orange bell pepper that had been sitting in the refrigerator for quite some time and was past its prime. It wasn't bad- but you could tell by looking at it that there would be no satisfying crunch if you had a piece of it. Adding it to the recipe was the perfect use for it... The recipe gives instructions for making your own hot honey; however, I have two store bought bottles of hot honey so making my own seemed very much unnecessary. We both really liked this meal. I sent a picture to Alyssa of it with a description and she already says that she wants me to make this during winter break. I took this picture after taking it out of the oven for the first time. The rice was not done as you can see in this picture-I added more water and cooked it for a few minutes more until the rice was cooked. 

5. Queso-  (not a meal but a hearty cheese dip seems like something great to have in the fall! I made the queso for taco Tuesday and then the next day used the leftovers for nachos.)

I have tried various recipes over the years. I do not have a go to but I always look for ones that calls for cornstarch and evaporated milk. Cornstarch because it supposedly helps make the queso smooth and evaporated milk because I often don't have milk in the refrigerator, but I almost always have evaporated milk in the pantry. When we had friends over recently, I wanted to make queso so I did a search of queso recipes with cornstarch and this one popped up:

Queso recipe

I changed the cheeses based on what I had on hand- I think I used eight ounces of colby jack and 4 ounces of pepper jack. I also omitted the tomatoes. It turned out really good....maybe I do have a go- to (albeit modified, queso recipe).

All of this food talk is making me look forward to the Thanksgiving meal and its food traditions. I enjoy finding new recipes that we love but there is something about a classic, traditional meal that is hard to beat! 

Linking up with Joanne for Talking about it Tuesday.