This is what greeted me when I came down to the kitchen this morning.
Almost scared the pajamas off of me, but the baby was so proud of herself,
feeding tea biscuits to the monkey's nose. And her little game kept her busy
while we baked a little while later.

You see, 'tis the season for pumpkins. And since Josh was gone for so long at
shul this morning, we made pumpkin  muffins. And mini muffins. And a pumpkin
bread. All from one recipe. Does it get better than that? Not from one 15 ounce
can of pumpkin, that's for sure. 

The first time I tasted anything pumpkin related, I was in California for
my uncle's wedding. In 1987. All the other kids were running around but my Bobby
Toby and I were sitting at the kiddie table, inhaling pumpkin muffins. My Bobby
Toby is no longer with us but for years, we had tried to recreate the same
delicious muffins we had had in 1987. And we couldn't. I think my Bobby's
problem was that she didn't bother to look for a recipe, she just winged it. I,
on the other hand, was always trying to make a "healthy" pumpkin muffin,
following different recipes, with flax seed and whole wheat flour. Then I pulled
out my old pumpkin bread recipe that I always tried to play around with and instead of using weird ingreidents, I just replaced some of the sugar with less sugar
and switched the margarine for oil. 
 
Instead of using the three cups of sugar that the recipe listed, I used two. Still awful, I know. But one taste of these muffins and I was back in California with my Bobby Toby, wearing my burgundy colored crushed velvet dress with white tights and shiny black mary-janes. And a matching velvet headband with a bow. Stuffing muffins into my mouth. Memories. These are deliciously unhealthy and definitely a once-in-a-blue-moon treat. Today must be a blue moon kinda day.

Here is the recipe, with my modifications:
1 15ounce can of pureed pumpkin, not pie filling
2 cups sugar
1 cup water or soy milk
1 cup oil
4 eggs
3 and 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease whatever pans you'd like to use. I
used one loaf pan, one muffin pan with 12 spaces, and one mini muffin pan with
24 spaces. 

In a bowl of a standing mixer (or by hand), mix the sugar, soy milk or
water, oil, eggs and pumpkin. Add the dry ingredients and mix until combined.
Pour half the batter into the loaf. Start baking the loaf pan right away because
that pan takes the longest, at about 50 minutes, but start checking it at 30
minutes to be sure the top isn't burning. I tented my loaf pan with foil at the
35 minute mark and left it like that until it was done, about 15 minutes later. 
 
Then pour the batter into the mini muffin tin and bake that on the other
rack. These take the shortest, coming in at about 11 minutes. Next fill the
regular sized muffin pan, move it to side and wash the dirty bowl and spoons. By
now the mini muffins should be done and the regular sized muffins can go in. The
regular sized ones took about 18 minutes to bake.

Let cool and eat. Or store in a Ziploc bag on the counter. Or wrap in foil
and stick in a labeled freezer bag and freeze. All good options. And just think
how lucky we are to have freezer bags to keep the food we work so hard on from
getting freezer burn. There were no dedicated freezer bags in 1987. That's why
we had to eat all those muffins. We were really just doing a service to the
hostess. 

It's amazing what you can accomplish during a one hour naptime.
Here is our succah before:

And here is our succah after.

I'm about halfway through, but I don't know if I will remember to take another picture later on.

The only problem I can forsee is that I decorated before the kids brought home this year's stash from school. We'll have to shift things around when they bring home their bags of decorations tomorrow, but at least, for now, I am ahead of the game.

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The morning after - Yom Kippur, that is. The day dawns completely anew
when you can wake up and brush your teeth. Such a simple thing, yet it's
probably the one thing that makes you human enough in the morning to engage with
other humans. You can wear pajamas all day and stick a baseball cap on your mop
of unwashed hair and you will still have friends. But don't brush your teeth,
and forget it. Nobody will talk to you. So I guess that brushing teeth is really
the first beautiful mitzvah (or good deed) one can do, bein adam
l'chaveiro*, after Yom Kippur.

Sunday was a busy day. By 9am, we had four batches of  challah dough rising
on the counter. We should be good for challah until the week after
Succot. I feel good just saying that. And I also feel good because the last dish
that I used to prepare for Yom Kippur was washed by 9:30am which meant that we
were full steam ahead to Succot by 9:35am. 

The two main accomplishments yesterday were the baking of the challah and
the baking for the teachers. I only baked enough challah for the first three
days of Succot. The rest of the dough was shaped, frozen and slipped into
freezer bags to be baked at a later date. I have never done that before. I
usually bake all the dough and freeze baked challah but it was so hot out
yesterday and I refuse to turn the air conditioner on in October so one batch in
the oven was enough. And besides, there was a lot of cake baking to do and not
that much time.

To bake the frozen challah next week, I believe all I have to do it take
them out of the freezer, let them defrost a little and bake, possibly for a
little longer than usual. I just hope they don't lose their shape while they are
defrosting. I guess we'll find out next week.

On to the baking. Several years ago - when I only had one child in school -
I thought it would be a nice idea to bake something for the teachers before Rosh
Hashanah, something like an apple pie. That year there were three teachers. The
following year, with two kids in school, the number of teachers jumped to six,
but still manageable. Last year, we baked before Succot and gave out treats to
nine teachers, making pumpkin bread, a big hit. This year, I have three kids in
school. Care to guess how many teachers there are? You won't be able to and I
know that because I counted the number of teachers seven times before allowing
myself to understand that there are 14 wonderful people who teach my children. 
 
Fourteen. What to do? And what to bake? After agonizing (really, I agonized) I decided to go with an chocolate-chocolate-chip-applesauce cake.
It's a quick and easy recipe and did not involve peeling any apples or opening
any sharp cans of pumpkin as recipes of years past required.

This recipe comes from the mom of the girl who was one of my besties in
elementary school. We have been out of touch for ages and recently reconnected.
Her mom used to make this all the time and my friend was sweet enough to share
the recipe. I have no idea what the real name of the cake is, so we'll go with
Old-Time-Bestie's-Applesauce-Cake.

Here it is:
1 stick margarine
1 3/4 c sugar
1 lb applesauce
2 c flour
2 eggs
3 T cocoa
6 oz choc chops
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp baking soda

Cream the margarine and sugar. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix
well. If you are baking one cake, pour the batter into a 9x13 inch pan and bake
at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

If you are me and baking 14 cakes, you will make the recipe five times and
divide the batter among 15 pans (the pans came in sets of three). The pans were
rectangles, about 7"x4", possible a drop smaller, but I don't think so. Bake the
pans for 30 minutes each, testing the cake after 25 minutes. Not sure why but
some pans were done faster than others but I'm pretty sure that's a function of
my oven and not a function of the recipe.

Allow the pans to cool, cover them and come back tomorrow to see how we
wrapped them all up.

*Literally, between man and his friend.

Thanks for reading! And if you liked what you saw, please leave  a comment!

Back in the summer when we started planning the kid's birthday parties, we
made some decorations. Very simple, very fast and very re-usable, which is what
we like most in a decoration.

Everyone knows how to make party streamers. Cut strips of colored paper and
staple or tape the first one into a circle and just link the next circle to the
first. Simple. Easy. Straightforward. We always make these for birthday parties
and we always make these for our Succah. Every. Single. Year. And it was getting a
little old. Either they ripped before/during/after the party or they ripped
before/during/after Succot - or more likely, got rained on and fell apart, not
to mention the color draining right out of the colored paper and onto the
tablecloth.

There had to be a better way. And there is! We made these chain link party
streamers using colored craft foam, the same foam that is used to make the
Foamies letters and shapes that kids love to stick everywhere. The foam I used
came in sheets and was about $6 for a package of 40 large sized sheets, very
affordable. And I tested it in the sink, very waterproof.

I cut the sheets into strips, cutting the short side, so each sheet yielded a good
10 strips. Then the kids decided what patterns we would use, what color would go
next and they handed me the strips, I stapled and an hour later we had 5 huge
chains.

We used them for all our parties this summer and they are now safely packed
away in the Succah decorations bin in the basement, awaiting their next
mission.

Thanks for reading! And if you liked what you saw, please leave  a  comment!

This succah decoration is so super-simple to make that you can even do it
with two kvetchy little girls with bad coughs and a case of pink eye.
Like I did.

All you need is some yellow cardstock, markers, scissors and some more
cardstock in whatever colors you like; we used blue and green.

First we colored the yellow paper, making blue lines all over the paper for a
reason only evident to my three year old. Then I drew lemon shapes as a stand-in
for the etrog and I cut them out. While the girls were coloring, I cut out
triangles from the other paper, an equal number of blue and green triangles so
that each magen david could be made out of one green triangle and one blue
triangle

My nursery-going-three-year-old expertly glued all the pieces together -
the etrog on to the blue triangle and then the blue triangle onto the green one. 
 
Using a hole puncher and paper fasteners, I attached the magen davids in a
row and added ribbon to each end. The banner is now hanging in the porch, for
safekeeping until the succah is ready to be decorated. 

So easy. And all that gluing took at least twenty minutes. She's a
methodical three year old.

Thanks for reading! And if you liked what you saw,  please leave  a  comment!