Pin It And Do It Update

And I'm off and pinning! With the changing of the seasons, I'm fired up to try a bunch of new recipes. I kicked off my pins Sunday when I pulled out a can of pumpkin to give a little to my cats (apparently it's good for them?) and just had to find something to use the rest of the can in. Literally, the first recipe that came up on my Pinterest dessert board using pumpkin is the one we made - pumpkin dump cake. Dump cake is nothing new for us; my boys were both in Boy Scouts and brought home the idea of dump cakes years ago. This definitely takes the can of pie filling as the base up a notch.

Pumpkin Dump Cake

This is not my picture for two reasons. Miss H decided the cake mix should be pressed down which left us without such pretty layers AND we didn't have any yellow cake mix so used Funfetti cake mix. Tastes good but did leave us with kind of funny spots. Regardless, it was very tasty, especially once it completely cooled. By then we had, of course, already eaten half of the pan. Extra yummy with whipped cream!

That same night we were grilling steaks and I wanted a carb to go with them. We had potatoes and I remembered that I had pinned a recipe for Hasselback potatoes I thought I'd try. Again, this is not my picture (heck it's not even for the recipe I used!). I tweaked the recipe I used a bit, stuffing the potatoes with thin slices of sweet onion rather than garlic. I'm on a bit of a salt kick lately, so I used pink Himalayan sea salt which made a great crust.

Two of the books I've read this month, Jamie Ford's Songs of Willow Frost and Louise Erdrich's Round House, were both pinned to my Books To Read board prior to accepting the books for review this month. My review for Ford's book posted Tuesday and for Erdrich's on Wednesday. I also listened to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is month which I had on my Books To Read board.

Five down, three to go to reach my Pin Obsessed level goal but I'm sure that I'll be getting more than that done with more books planned from the Books To Read board and fall decorating that still needs to get finished up.  And I haven't even started on my bench yet!