#AMonthofFaves The Cook It, Bake It, Drink It or Eat It Edition

Today on #AMonthofFaves, the blog party hosted by Kim and Tanya at GirlXOXO (link here) and T of Traveling With T (link here), we are looking at all the yummy things. Yay! Below are the foods which defined 2019 for our family.

Thanks to a challenge from my blog friend, Emily, I started baking challah. I began in February and now I try to bake it about once a week. We eat one loaf for our Shabbat dinner on Friay night and, more often than not, Dave makes challah French toast with the second loaf for Saturday supper. YUM!!!

 

An Instagram friend, Erin, introduced me to the idea of apple nachos. You can find her simple recipe for them here. I highly recommend eating them with caramel sauce, chocolate sauce, chocolate chips, and cinnamon. The beauty of these is you can make them however you want. Again, YUM!!!

I made up a recipe for a salad to use up all the beans we were getting in our CSA this summer. It has avocados and feta cheese in it as well. I ate it a lot for lunches this summer. You can see the "recipe" in the second paragraph of this post here.

Another favourite of mine this summer was grilled romaine lettuce with Caesar dressing. It sounds weird but it was soooo good. You just put a bit of olive oil on the lettuce, grill it for a couple of minutes, and then add Ceasar dressing. I can't wait until the baby romaine is ready next summer.

The kids got excited about making a few things this year. Sam's specialty was baking scones. He made me Earl Grey ones for Mother's Day and has a recipe for a pumpkin spice one. Both are delicious! He even baked all the scones for his cousins' graduation tea.

 

Not one to be left out, Rachel started taking a lot of responsibility whenever we have Pasta Bake. The link to the original recipe is no longer active so it's a good thing I have it memorized. Yikes! Since I'm vegetarian, we use veggie ground round, and there's no cooking involved ahead of time which is nice.

I discovered a really simple pasta dish that uses up lots of vegetables and which the kids love. I've made it a few times this fall using whatever veggies we have on hand. This particular rendition had carrots and bok choy! You can find the recipe (with another link to it) here.

This fall the kids have been loving taking cold steamed broccoli for their lunches so it feels like I can't talk about the tastes of 2019 without mentioning that. Sam has also been going through dill pickles by the jar so I want to remember that too! Three jars might last about a week and a half. It's nuts!!!

We also became involved in a Country of the Week pilot project and I added the idea of cooking something from that country each week. I wrote a whole post about new recipes we'd discovered and loved from that experiment. You can read that post and find links to the recipes here. One of our favourites is this Danish oven pancake pictured below.

And I would say that this is a pretty good sampling of some of the tastes of 2019 in our family. It's been a DELICIOUS year!!!