TGIF

Woo! I love Fridays and here we are.

This has been a great week, last Friday night started the weekend off on the right foot. Kate and I got dinner at a new restaurant here in Moscow, The Lodgepole. It might be one of my new faves. I had the Lavender Melon Mimosa, it was perfect, and so fresh. Who said you can’t have a mimosa with your dinner, probably no one, but I felt like breakin’ some imaginary rules.

We decided to share everything we ordered, and this was the salad we had. Look at that goat cheese schmear.

If you know me, you know I am obsessed with the Pioneer Woman! Everything she does is great, she makes food people actually want to cook and eat. She has given me so many ideas and I’ve made so many of her recipes. While I was out shopping this weekend I got a few of her really cute plates from her new line.

I roasted up some brussel sprouts with some olive oil, salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar for myself this week. Roasting vegetables is one of my favorite ways to cook vegetables, it’s simple, brings a lot of flavor and makes for an easy clean up. That actually might be my favorite part; cooking = lots of dishes…

We had Eric’s linebackers over on Thursday to celebrate their win this last weekend!! Cooking for football players is always a lot of work and can be stressful. Let’s just say I cried the first time we had the players over…but now I feel like I’ve got it down. For me it’s all about the prep work; prep, prep and more prep. I kept it fairly simple and made spaghetti bolognese, chicken Parmesan without breading, garlic bread, salad and the Pioneer Woman’s Apple Dumplings. On Sunday I started prepping for Thursday night, from making lists, chopping, cooking and trying to make room in the fridge for everything. Doing all of this in advance is sooo helpful for the day of… sweating when you sit down for dinner is not ideal. Although, I was panicked when the chicken took way longer to cook than anticipated, thus everything got pushed back but in the end everything turned out great.

If you’ve never made PW’s apple dumplings, I highly suggest you change that. It is the most simple, tasty, cinnamon and butter drenched, flaky pastry dessert. You and everyone you know will love it, also it only uses 2 apples so you’re not slaving over peeling and chopping a bag of apples for a single dish like some other apple desserts out there.

I tripled the recipe, hence the large pile of apple slices.