Mid-week Weekend Cooking

All I meant to do was make a pot of chili on Tuesday. Really, that was going to be it.

And some cornbread.

Then, as long as the oven was on, I added a few more dishes.

Like applesauce.





Roasted Brussels sprouts, after plucking them off that giant stalk.









Tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, a little balsamic vinegar, and dried thyme. Roast for 30 minutes or until browned and softened, yum!


Of course, there was the chili, cobbled together from a few recipes. I don't often make chili.



I sauteed the onion, pepper and garlic, adding in plenty of cumin, chili powder, and salt/pepper.



Next, I minced up the chipotle peppers and added them and the leftover adobo sauce to the skillet, then browned the meat with it all together. Threw the two bags of frozen pinto beans (ones I made back a few months back which had been hanging out in my freezer) it in a big pot with both cans of sauce, added a little more seasonings, and let it simmer for the rest of the day.



Not the most exciting picture, but you all know what chili looks like. :) The chipotles actually made it a little too spicy for me, but Hubby liked it so it's mostly his. The leftovers are about to get packed up and frozen tonight.

As for me, my girlfriend J had joined me at the farmer's market on Sunday because she wanted to pick up a spaghetti squash to use in this recipe. I already had 4 of them sitting on my counter --




--so I cut up a couple of them and baked them while the chili simmered. I had reserved some of the ground beef instead of using it all in the chili, so I browned that and added in one of my remaining frozen bags of homemade sauce (a new batch will be made this weekend!) in a skillet. The recipe then calls for tossing the squash in 3 eggs, flour and cheese to make the base, which I did, then poured the meat sauce over it.

Just before it went in...



After it came out.



It's a good recipe, but I don't love it. Maybe because both times I reheated it, it was either too cool, so the eggs were chunky, or too overcooked, so everything had dried out. It's not that different from my usual treatment of spaghetti squash as spaghetti mixed with sauce and turkey meatballs, so I am not sure what the problem is. But I am still eating it up!

In the end, I had:
cornbread (not picured)
roasted Brussels sprouts
applesauce
chili
spaghetti pie
extra squash

Plus I worked like a crazy person at my kitchen table all day. Pretty productive day!

(P.S. Thanks for the heads-up about the photos not appearing. I switched from iPhoto to Aperture as my photo software on the Mac, and some of the settings had it updating photos even after I had loaded them to Flickr. That cause the URLs to change. I turned off all the settings I could find that might be causing the unwanted syncing, so I hope that the Flickr photos stay static going forward. I will give it a couple of days to test then I will go back and fix the rest of the photos in this month's posts. Sigh!)