As I posted yesterday, we had a weekend full of cooking. We ended up not making the gnocchi for dinner since both of us snacked a bit too much at the book club. Plus, it was after 8 when people left and neither The Pedant or I felt like cooking much. We will make it tonight along with cooking up a Beet and Gorgonzola salad and setting a sweet potato and winter squash soup in the slow cooker for more easy to grab lunches. But, I can talk about some of the foods we made this weekend.

First, I'll start with Friday Dinner. TP found a recipe on the Mark Bittman blog, Bitten, for a Carrot, Spinach and Rice Stew, which worked out really well. It was nice and creamy (thanks butter!) and totally tasty. Also, although it took a while to thicken, it was pretty easy to make. We decided to make some sweet potatoes that we had gotten from our CSA and, according to a brilliant idea of TP's, I mashed 2 up with about 3/4 of a cup of red kidney beans (for protein). I added some cinnamon, salt, pepper, hot pepper flakes and EVOO and it came out really well. It was sweet and spicy with a really interesting taste.

Sunday we baked for my book club and had had pretty good success. We made polenta cookies from Lidia's Italy and they came out really well. We used a stand mixer not a food processor (I try to keep the food processor parve and the recipe call for butter) and it worked really well. I was supposed to pipe out crescents, but I didn't have a pipping bag, so I shaped them by hand which worked fine. They were a hit, and a bigger hit at work! We also made Peanut Butter Cupcakes from the Joy of Cooking that came out a bit more like muffins. I think for a few reasons: 1) I didn't follow the recipe perfectly and didn't alternate the wet and dry ingredients; 2) I used skim milk not whole milk; 3) I used natural peanut butter that was from the bottom of a large jar and was pretty dense; 4) I didn't frost them with a maple frosting because I didn't have confectioner's sugar. We did add about 1/2 a cup of receese peanut butter chips which added a great flavor, but we should have added in a full cup for more peanut buttery goodness.

As for the minestrone, I was pretty full from snacking during the book club so I only had a few tastes. It came out really well. We finally remembered to add in some Parmesan rinds to the cooking which I think made a huge difference. (A tip of the great Lidia!) Really good!