Made a great soup.....perfect for these winter days.  I chop up onions (I like sweet onions) and carrots and saute them in the bottom of the soup pot with some olive oil.  It gets a bit brown, then I added 4 cubes of basil and 6 cubes of garlic, as well as 1t oregano. I added in 1T of red wine vinegar, a large can of tomato puree, 2 boxes of beef broth, 1 small can of fire roasted tomatoes, 1 can garbanzo beans, frozen cut green beans, and frozen lima beans (the amount is your choice).  I also cut up some green cabbage and put it in the soup.  I browned turkey sweet Italian sausage in another pan - for people to add in into the soup if they wanted more protein.  As you know, I always like to have flexibility to what I served since everyone likes things different.  I let the soup cook on a very low flame for about 1 hour.  It was SO rich and delicious!

Wow...does that look good!  It is great because you can really add in whatever you want....I would add corn, but my husband can't have that.  I would also like to add in some spinach....but no one likes that.  Zucchini as well....again no one likes that either!!  Oh well....some vegis are better than no vegis!

Let's talk briefly about winter.  Do you love it - do you hate it?  I love it - well, that is I love everything about winter except for the early darkness.  Not much gets me down as much as when it is pitch black out at 4:30pm....do you call that night or still afternoon?!?!  Everything else about winter is great....the clothes, the snow (yes, I said the snow), the cold temperature (yes to that too) and we can't forget about the foods. There are definitely winter foods....soup, chili, slow cooker recipes, squash.  What do people in always warm climates do....never eat chili??  Never eat homemade vegetable soup?? Never eat butternut squash?? I just can't imagine that!!!  How sad........

I love going out with friends.  It just breaks up the week and gives me something to look forward to.  Sushi of Tokyo is one of my favorites.  It is all you can eat....and I can eat a lot there!!  At these all you can eat places, you don't feel a rush to get out when you are done, because one never knows when they are done there. What I like is that you just eat 3 pieces of this kind of roll....3 pieces of that kind of roll......variety is the spice of life!

One catch is that you cannot leave rice behind....which sucks.  Sometimes there is too much rice and I don't like being forced to eat it.  Shhhh....I do sometimes leave some rice between the plates that I stack up.  It is just too much sometimes.  Don't tell anyone!!

One word...Monkey Bread....ok....two, but everyone eats it so fast that it might as well be one word!!

It is just SOOOO delicious and SOOOO easy!  Get bread rolls (the kind that are just dough - not cooked) from the freezer section of the grocery store.  Leave them in the refrigerator for the night to thaw.  In the morning, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a bundt pan.  Even if it is nonstick - I would still spray it down with Pam.  In a bowl, make a cinnamon sugar mixture.  Rip the rolls into pieces...halves, thirds, quarters, whatever. Roll each piece in the sugar mixture and then put it into the pan.  Just keep doing it until you use all the pieces.  Pour over the top 3/4 of a stick of melted butter. Put it in the oven for about 35 minutes.  Be careful....it will almost triple in height, so don't have it too close to the top of the oven. Let it sit for about 5 minutes, then invert.  I put it on a glass cake stand, but you can put it on any kind of plate.  If you want, you can add almost anything to this....apples, nuts, raisins....etc.

What a crowd pleaser! One of our daughter had some friends sleep over and I made this for them so that it would be warm when they woke up.  They devoured it.  I think this will be my regular thing when kids sleep over.  I need to keep some frozen rolls in the freezer for just this occasion.

I am really trying to get the kids to have people over to the house more....which I have learned includes having  junk food in the house.  That was one of the main complaints when I asked why don't you have friends over more.  "You don't have good food."  Ironic, and humorous, that to them "good food" equals "junk food'.  Whatever - as the kids would say! So, I have chips and now this monkey bread as a lure.

 Made another good dinner....pork tenderloin, butternut squash, and roasted potato.

 Here is the butternut squash.  I put it on a baking sheet that is lined with non-stick tin foil.  What a great product!! I cut it into about 1 inch pieces, dibbled around it agave maple syrup and a bit of cinnamon.  I cooked it at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. SOOO good and all the kids liked it. It wasn't very sweet - which was great so that you could really taste the squash.

For the red roasted potatoes, I cut them into about 1 inch pieces and put it also in the oven at 400 degrees on a non-stick tin foil lined pan.  I put a bit of Smart Balance oil in the pan also.  After about 15 minutes, you need to toss the potatoes and cook them another 15 minutes.  Right before eating, I put fresh crushed sea salt over the whole pan of potatoes.  Perfectly cooked!

Here is the pork tenderloin. I put a dry rub on it of Fat Boy's All Purpose Seasoning.  I bought it at work.  They use this at work for rubbing on the ribs they make.  I put it on the tenderloin, wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for the whole day.  I took it out of the fridge about 1 hour before cooking to lose the cold of the fridge to allow for the meat to cook for evenly.  I seared it in a very hot pan, then baked it in the oven at 400 degrees.  I had a thermometer in it to make sure it hit the temperature needed for pork.  It was SOOOO tender and tasty.  I will definitely be making it like this again.  And it was on sale at work, so the whole pork piece was only $5.55....to feed the whole family.  Can't beat that!!

I made a delicious dinner....if I do say so myself.  I made homemade tomato sauce, and to go with the sauce, roasted eggplant and portobello mushrooms and chicken thighs.  The chicken was on sale at work.  I just put it in a baking dish (lined with tin foil so no clean up) and baked it.

It was also our oldest daughter's birthday.  She wanted Lou Malenti's pizza, so we had that also.  I picked that up while the sauce was simmering.  Lots of good food!!!

Here's how I made the sauce.

 In a small stock pan, I put 1 onion chopped with some olive oil.

 Once the onions were a slight browned, I added 8 cubes of garlic and 5 cubes of basil (the Dorat cubes - see the things I like in my kitchen area of the blog), and 2 t of dried oregano.  I like to rub the dried herbs between my hands as I put them in the pan.  Breaking them up further releases whatever oils are left in them...allowing for more flavor to come out of the herbs.

 After about 5 minutes of the herbs and onions cooking together, I added 2 large cans of tomato puree and 1 large can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes.  I like to use fire roasted canned tomatoes whenever I can.  I like the look of the bits of char in the sauce, and I also feel like they have more flavor that just regular canned tomatoes. I added 2T red wine vinegar and 2T agave.  I am trying to cook more with agave.  If you don't have that, you can use sugar at the same proportion.  We had left over sauce, which we put in a ziploc bag and froze for another meal.

 I roasted eggplant and portobello mushrooms together.  I peel the eggplant, but do like to leave just a bit of the purple skin on it.  I like the texture it adds to the eggplant.  I also use non-stick tin foil.  I love that product!!

 Here is my dish...as you can see, I added some mozzarella cheese.  Just a bit, but that stringy bite would be missed if I didn't have it.  This was very healthy and very, well, great.  The sauce it so good it can go on anything and it would be delicious!

Here are the cupcakes I bought at work to celebrate with.  Major yum here!  I bought 5 different flavors....left to right....double chocolate, red velvet, chocolate mint, smores, and oreo.  We cut them into halves and shared.

Short entry...here is what our daughter did with her oreo....who said you shouldn't play with your food!

We had a birthday dinner at Cheesecake Factory.  I had such a good dinner.  With that being said...that place adds up.  But it does deliver good food and lots of choices for everyone.

We started with Chicken potstickers.  Those were good.  BUT (and this is a big but on purpose because this is a HUGE problem to me!) on the menu it doesn't say sesame seeds and as you can see, there were a lot on this dish.

 I had the Seared Tuna Tataki salad.  It was on their new Skinnylicious menu meaning it was under 590 (not 600...like something is only $5.99 - so much cheaper than $6) calories.  It was SO good.  My only complaint was that the coating on the tuna was a bit too spicy for my liking.  Here is the description "Fresh Ahi Lightly Seared and Served Rare with Avocado, Tomato and Mixed Greens Tossed with Wasabi Vinaigrette" . See - no mention of the dry rub on the tuna....again a poor description.  I did like the dressing it came with - kind of soy sauce with plenty of vinegar.  And enough tuna to last the whole salad - which is a great thing!

 Here is the cheesecake I had - Kahlua Cocoa Coffee Cheesecake.  Here is the description "Layers of Rich Brownie, Kahlua Cheesecake, Creamy Chocolate Mousse and Chocolate Ganache".  They finally got a description right! And it was delicious!!!!!  See what they did for my birthday??  Nice touch.

All in all - a great meal.  Everyone loved what they had....just adds up very fast there.