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Friday night: Halloween! Trick-or-treating and dinner under the stars (pulled pork sandwiches, baked potato salad, green salad, festive whoopie pies). Saturday: farmer’s market, housecleaning, goofing off, Blackadder and burgers for dinner. Sunday: first outdoor Sunday lunch of the season (mushroom risotto, kale salad, and mixed-berry crumble with ice cream), and the realization that I need to develop a Sunday lunch strategy for when vegetarians are on the guest list. (Suggestions welcome!)

How was your weekend?

NaBloPoMo 4.0

As I mentioned in passing yesterday, it's November and that means time for NaBloPoMo again. I had a long internal debate over whether to participate again this year, especially given my horrendous rate of posting over most of 2014. But I couldn't bear the thought of dropping the ball, especially for such a weak reason as "I'm too busy". Because who isn't? And deciding that I'm too busy to do something that I really, really like to do just seems like a bad way to go all around. So I'm in: I've got a list of potential topics and writing prompts, and have issued a challenge to myself to break out of my overwork-induced recipe rut and try some new stuff, so that I can post about it here. I even went back and checked the suggestions from last year that I never got around to, and they're on the list too. (But feel free to send more!)

Anyone else signing on? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Halloween shenanigans

Halloween 2014 is in the bag for pretty much everyone at this point; we're already well into the first of November here. We had a fun celebration; Miss B and I MacGyvered her costume and props over a couple of days (see if you can guess who she was from the primary prop pictured at the bottom of this post), and early Friday evening a small pack of fathers and children set off from our house to roam the neighborhood in search of loot. They came back a couple of hours later, hot and thirsty (Canberra temperatures hit the high 20s/80s yesterday) for large glasses of ice water, beer, or sangria (depending) and dinner on the patio, topped off with Halloween whoopie pies (regular chocolate whoopie pie cakes, sandwiched with fluffy buttercream colored festively orange).

Hope everyone else who celebrates had fun too! I'll be back tomorrow with more shenanigans to report, because...it's November and you know what that means!

Where's my whoopie pie?