Baking Up Gratitude

Last night was Pumpkin Potluck. Never mind that no pumpkins were actually carved, we all met and the food was good and the company was even better.

We ate:
Roast chicken
Sweet potato and apple casserole
Salad
Salad (my b on delegating veggies)
Bread
Pumpkin Whoopie Pies (omg)
Brandy-Spiced Cider/Mulled Wine

Despite the heat in the kitchen, the weather was lovely enough that we could open the door and let the delicious, rain-soaked air drift in and not catch pneumonia. Today it's about 70* out and I just don't even know what to do with myself because I feel like it's summer, part 3, and just seeing sun this late in October is fan-effing-tastic.

Side note, isn't the sun amazing? My friend Micah wrote this a while back:

"Sometimes I like to step back and think about how amazing some things are. Right now: the sun.

Think about it. It's a giant ball of burning gas that not only provides light to things directly in its path, but even the inside of buildings with solid walls and in the shadow of trees and cliffs and mountains. It warms whichever side of the earth is facing it so much during the day that the place is still livable at night when facing away. It somehow provides us with vitamin D. It is basically the way plants breathe. Storms on its surface can completely fuck us. It turns water into vapor. And the damn thing is so hot that, even from millions of miles away, it can burn our skin.

That's fucking amazing."

Okay, back to food.

Yesterday before potluck I also cooked up a batch of bolognese, because I could, completely without a recipe. We'll see how it tastes tonight. The trick in my family is to make a pot of it and then just let it sit in the fridge for one day to fully absorb all of the wonderfulness. This is extremely difficult in that the sauce usually cooks all day and the house smells fab and then we sit down to have dinner, eagerly anticipating and then... we have porkchops. Or nachos. Or... ramen soup.

As another aside, an image search for bolognese pulls up...
For realz?

I also made a pumpkin cheesecake for my lawyer friend. I hope it turns out well. It was so easy I actually hope to make another tonight for my own personal consumption. Hooray for Food and Wine magazine, as well as The Staudt family (my lovely babysitting charges) for providing me with an excellent springform pan.

And since this post is sufficiently long enough, I will return later this week with tales of cheesecake and whoopie pies. (You may know them elsewhere as moon pies.)

Happy eating,

a