Pumpkin Bread

Hey hey, merry Christmas. I made some pumpkin bread this morning and it turned out really well. Very tasty and a nice Christmas morning bread! Recipe is below... Also have a picture here of Liam with a Longhorns hat on, that he got from Joyce and Jack (my second cousin?) in Texas.

Pumpkin Bread

1 3/4 cup pumpkin puree (one 15 ox can)

1 1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup butter

3 eggs

3 cups flour

2 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

2 cups walnuts or chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Combine pumpkin, sugar, eggs, and butter; mix until creamy. Mix dry ingredients and then add to wet ingredients. The batter should hold a spoon up but still be wet. If you need a little more flour that is fine. Add in your nuts or chips at the end and mix.

You can make one large loaf or 2-3 small loafs or muffins out of the batter.

muffins: 20-25 minutes

small loafs: 25-30 minutes

large loaf: 50-60 minutes

Enjoy!!

Pumkin Spice Waffles

A couple of weeks ago I found this recipe online for Spiced Pumpkin Waffles. It looked really good and I had a package of elk sausage that was left over from a trip to Schweitzer. I made them one night for dinner and fell in love. This is a great recipe and if you have the sausage they are even better.

This recipe is from the following website:

(http://www.countryliving.com/recipefinder/spiced-pumpkin-waffles-3827)

2 1/2 cup(s) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon(s) baking powder
2 teaspoon(s) cinnamon
1 teaspoon(s) ginger
1/2 teaspoon(s) baking soda
1/2 teaspoon(s) salt
1/2 teaspoon(s) fresh-ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon(s) cloves
4 large eggs
2 cup(s) buttermilk
1 cup(s) pumpkin purée
1/2 cup(s) dark brown sugar
1/4 cup(s) (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 teaspoon(s) pure vanilla extract

Pre-heat your waffle iron. Combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and cloves in a large bowl and set aside. Whisk together the eggs, buttermilk, pumpkin purée, sugar, butter, and vanilla in another large bowl until smooth. While whisking, add the flour mixture and blend until smooth.

Cook according to your waffle iron instructions. You may want to grease the iron a little more than usual.

Oh, and by the way, I hate poo!

Not the little bear mind you, but the stinky kind. The kind that little 3 year olds think is fun to smear all over your carpet and furniture.

Yes, that's right, this morning I was taking Liam to school. I had just left the house and was maybe 200 yards down the road when ViviAnne called my cell phone. She was crying and said that she went upstairs to our room and found that Asa and Darius had pulled all of the stuff out of ViviAnne's hope chest and then pooped all over it all. This was stuff that she had been saving sense she was a little girl.

I turned around and went home to help clean it all up, making Liam 15 minutes late to school and me about an hour late to work. I wonderful Monday morning.

Into December

Well, time is still flying by. It is already December now. Cougar football is over, probably for the best. It will be interesting to see how they recover for the next season and see if there is any improvement. I think that there will be, but this season was so bad that it would be hard to do worse... I guess we could be as bad as the Huskies, but I don't think that will happen, I am confident that we will get it turned around.

The basketball season is now in full pre-conference swing. The cougars are doing great, we had a tough game against number 3 Pitt. But, we are young and it was a great learning experience on how to close out an opponent the last 10 minutes of the game. Two big, big games coming up. First against number 24 Baylor tonight, and then against number 5 Gonzaga. We beat both teams last year and I am thinking we will probably loose to the Zags and grind out a win with Baylor. Both games are at home for us, so that is a big plus.

ViviAnne has a client that is in labor today, so I will probably have a long night waiting for her to get home. Hopefully the birth will go quickly. The boys are going crazy right now, they are playing some kind of game that involves a lot of screaming and running around the living room. It is hard to tell if there are any rules to the game or not. About every 45 seconds someone gets hurt and we have to intervene.