Pin It and Do It

Y'all know how much I love when Trish (Love, Laughter, and A Touch of Insanity) hosts the Pin It and Do It challenge! She hasn't done it for quite a while (it being a lot of work for a working mom with two littles) so I was excited to see that she had decided to bring it back again this fall and it prompted me to open up my boards to see what I could get to this fall.

Books To Read: I will have knocked off several books from my Books To Read board before the end of this month, including Jojo Moyes' After You, Geraldine Brooks' The Secret Chord, Stewart O'Nan's Last Night At The Lobster,  and Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last. It would probably be unfair to say that the challenge prompted me to read any of these since I was already planning on reading them this fall. Still...they were all pinned!

Fall/Holidays: A simple thing - I just filled a vase with a candle and yellow popping corn and tied my candle with some raffia. I actually had this pinned in several variations. I guess I must have liked the idea!

Drinks: It being fall, it was time to buy some apple cider. Since I already have caramel vodka, we made some hot cider with caramel vodka one night. I also used the caramel vodka in lieu of caramel sauce to make to make both salted caramel hot cocoa the night I watched the lunar eclipse and caramel apple sangria, both of which I had also pinned.

Food/Appetizers/Desserts:

• Texas Roadhouse Butter was a bust but one we will try again with some changes. The recipe called for sticks of butter but if you've had Texas Roadhouse butter, you know that it is fluffy. So when we retry it, I'll be using whipped butter as my base as well as reducing the honey by about a third. Hot caprese dip was a total fail. The cheese did not melt at all the way the recipe said it would. Maybe a different brand of fresh mozzarella would have worked better but I'd rather just turn it into salad which I know we all love.

• Crockpot lasagna soup would probably have been just fine if I had read the recipe through before I started or if I had even been thinking. The recipe calls for all of the ingredients to be cooked for 4-5 hours on high and then adding the noodles. Yeah, I just threw it all in at once, including the noodles. To say they were mush would be an understatement.  It's definitely a recipe I will do again. 

• Texas Trash dip, on the other hand, was a huge success. It did make a full 9" x 13" pan so I'd probably cut the recipe in half if I make it again and have a lot of other things with it. The plus side of the huge batch was that we nibbled it all through Sunday football games and I even took some for lunch on Monday. Good thing we liked it! 

• Caramel Apple Cake was another recipe that I will tweak but will make again. It called for a can of caramel frosting but that seemed to be too sugary. I'd either top it with caramel ice cream topping or make my own caramel frosting the next time. 

• Refrigerator Sweet Pickles was another hit. It turned out exactly the way the recipe said it would and everyone in my family liked them. I could chop them up to make pickle relish, we put them on sandwiches and ate them all by themselves.  I would like to figure out a way to reduce the number of seeds in them (grow seedless cucumbers, maybe?), otherwise, this is one we'll definitely do again next summer. Best part of the recipe is that you can keep adding new cucumber slices to the brine as you use pickles up so you can constantly have a full batch.

All in all, a successful Pin It and Do It challenge, I'd say! Thanks, Trish, for pushing us, again, to not just think about what we'd like to do but to actually do it.