Tomato and White Bean soup

I can't believe that it's almost Thanksgiving!  Where has this year gone?  I suppose that it helps that this time of year is my favorite time.  While I'm not a fan of the coming winter, I enjoy fall immensely. 

There are a series of events that make fall the best time of the year.  First, we have the changing of the leaves.  This is one of my favorite times to take a long walk outside.  When I was younger, we would always head out to Chesnut Ridge Park and walk through the leaves.  My family and I would crunch through piles of fallen leaves, while gazing at the bright colors still clinging to the branches.

After the leaves begin to change, we are greeted by Halloween.  As we've discussed before, we never got trick-or-treaters at our house.  This didn't keep us from decorating the house and carving pumpkins.  I always carved using a template, my mom always made beautiful  pumpkins without any help at all.

Once we've put away the costumes and the pumpkins have gone to the mulch pile, it was time for the most important day all year, my birthday.  I just celebrated my birthday, which means that we're in the thick of Fall!  From here we get to celebrate Thanksgiving (at least here in the USA!) and on to shopping and christmas we go.

For the next few weeks, we're all going to be very, very busy!  With that in mind, I've made you this delicious and healthy soup, that will be ready in ten minutes.  Fabulous!

Coconut-Cherry Muffins

When boyfriend and I returned from Thailand, we slept a whole bunch.  For some reason we were just fine when we got to Thailand, well almost fine.  As we walked home from dinner the first night (after sixteen hours on a plane keep in mind!), my body started falling asleep.  My feet would all of a sudden go to bed, while I was trying to walk.  There are some good looking pictures of me, falling asleep at the restaurant.  I nearly fell over at least five times on our way back to the hotel.  Someone kept making fun of me and taking pictures of me as I fell asleep.


Coconut flowers and a sprouting coconut



Look, a baby coconut!

After getting a good nights sleep, we were much better.  It was much easier to walk down the street when my legs were trying to take a nap.  The jet lag wasn't too bad and I'm assuming it was because we were so excited about being in Thailand.


Cooking down coconut syrup

 

Nearly finished coconut sugar

  Returning home was a totally different story.  Jet lag hit us both, hard.  We arrived home after travelling from Phuket to Hong Kong to Vancouver to New York City, in a mere twenty-four hours.  We went from eight-five degrees and high humidity to a snow-covered, below-freezing New York, it was not a pleasant return.  When we finally got back to our apartment, things went well for an hour or two.  We emptied out the suitcases, put a load of laundry in the washing machine and showered.  Then we sat on the couch and turned on some HGTV.  That's when it went downhill as we fell asleep for about four hours, oops.


Palm sugar, cooling into their traditional shape



The bees like palm sugar too!


The first morning of being back in our house we woke up at the completely unnatural hour of four o'clock am.  The rest of the week we kept falling asleep at 9:00 and waking up at 5:00.  I was so proud of us when we stayed up until the evening news on Friday night.  Yup, we're party animals.


Getting the meat out of the coconut



The finished product, coconut oil!

There was one exciting thing about coming home, other than sleeping in my own bed again, packages in the office!  While we were gone I had a few packages arrive in the apartment office.  One was a book, one was a present for boyfriend and the third was from Kelapo!  I was contacted by Kelapo just before we went on vacation about trying some of their virgin coconut oil.  After travelling to Thailand I was even more excited about getting this package in the mail because we visited a coconut farm! 

The pictures you see throughout this post were from the coconut farm, where they made everything from coconut oil, coconut (or palm) sugar, coconut milk and items made from the coconut shell.  The farm smelled wonderful and was full of bees.  At least the bees weren't interested in stinging us, they just wanted to eat the palm sugar.  When I returned home and opened up the Kelapo virgin coconut oil I was transported back to the coconut farm.  Thank you Kelapo, for bringing me back to vacation.

Honey Roasted Peanut butter cookies

Just when I had thought that we were back to our normal sleeping schedule, daylight savings time rolls around.  Nuts!  I was just getting back to sleeping normal person hours again and now I'm waking up an hour early again.  At least I'm not waking up four hours early, so it should be a little easier to adjust, two days instead of an entire week!

After readjusting to Eastern standard time, I felt like I could finally get back into the kitchen this weekend.  It's been a little while since I was in front of the oven, so I needed a little help in deciding what to make.  Early Saturday morning I was looking through recipes and trying to decide what to make for the week and I thought that we could use some cookies.

I turned to boyfriend and asked what kind of cookies he wanted.  "Peanut butter."  Okay, plain and simple.  I've posted a few peanut butter cookies on here before and thought you could use something a little more special than just plain peanut butter cookies.  Then I remembered a recipe that I made a number of years ago while I was in grad school.  I remember making them so vividly because how long it took to make the recipe. 

This is not a complicated recipe, but as written in the cookbook, this recipe yields over eight dozen cookies.  Between making the dough, baking the cookies and icing them, it took an entire evening to make the recipe as written.  I wanted to make them again, but not nearly that many cookies.  So, I present to you a smaller batch, with a bigger boost of peanut butter.  I also thought we could use a little whole grain in our treats this weekend and swapped out half of the flour for whole wheat flour.