Weekend Foodie Roundup...

We've had a busy weekend here. To keep our strength up, we've been cooking like mad.

My dad was in town for a visit and this is one of the meals I made up that I thought he'd enjoy. I stacked slices of a medium rare steak with crispy bacon, caramelized onions, buttery sauteed wild mushrooms, and smoked gouda. All of this was piled generously on a toasted keiser roll.

While we were at my parents' house here in Asheville cleaning it up and readying it for renters, we discovered three small bright orange pumpkins in the now defunct garden. We had a couple of options. We could decorate them, we could have a blast with them, OR I could make pumpkin pies, (which I ended up doing). I made two large pies and a slew of mini-pies. The filling turned out light, custardy and delicate. I was pleasantly surprised for my first attempt at a pumpkin pie from scratch.

We got a huge craving for those scalloped potatoes from the other night and made up another batch. I kept them in the oven a little bit extra for an extremely flavorful, golden brown crunch. We served them up with some citrus rosemary hammered chicken tenders. I double-dredged them – once in a flour, rosemary, curry, sweet paprika mixture and then in French's French fried onions. We experimented with baking them with excellent results.