What Do You Get When You Combine Pumpkin, Mushrooms, Quinoa, and Yogurt?

Several months ago I came across this recipe for pumpkin French toast (and corresponding recipe for pumpkin bread) and desperately wanted to make it. I’m a sucker for basically anything with pumpkin, and I love treating myself to special breakfasts on the weekends when breakfast won’t interfere with sleep (since sleep wins every time). This weekend, two of my girl friends came to town, and I finally got to make the pumpkin French toast! It was pretty much amazing, and I’m kind of excited to try turning any (every?) kind of quick bread into French toast. The pumpkin bread recipe gave us a nice, dense loaf of bread, so we had no problems with it falling apart while dunking each slice in milky-eggy-cinnamony goodness.

Then, for lunch, we tried Real Simple’s Yogurt-Marinated Chicken with Mushrooms and Sweet Potatoes recipe. Also a win! It was my first time to make quinoa and the girls’ first time to ever hear of quinoa. Surprisingly, it was very easy to cook! The trickiest part (once we found it, which was an adventure in and of itself) was rinsing it since all my strainers’ holes were too big. But we solved that by putting the quinoa in a coffee filter and running the water through that. Then it went into a small saucepan and cooked just like rice.

Marinating the chicken in the yogurt made it super moist with a lovely flavor, and my favorite part of the meal was the roasted sweet potatoes and mushrooms. Wal-Mart didn’t have shiitake mushrooms and they were out of creminis, so I substituted regular mushrooms and baby bellas, and they tasted great! The only thing I will do differently with this meal next time is make more sweet potatoes and mushrooms.

Up next week: Butternut squash, which is already on my counter so I cannot change my mind.

Sweet potatoes and mushrooms, fresh out of the oven!

Quinoa

Ready to eat! (Too bad chicken doesn't photograph well. Or too bad my plates are white.)