Cinnamon Pecan Quinoa with Berries

I cooked breakfast this morning and, in an attempt to start the day off in a healthy way, I prepared this wonderful batch of quinoa.  For those of you who don't know what quinoa is (I didn't until that magical grocery store, Trader Joe's, introduced me to it last year), it's a South American grain.  Mom calls it "hippie food" but she has been willing to eat it since her beloved Yahoo Homepage told her it's the super grain.  Also, it's not exotic - it's available in either the rice or bean aisle at the Wal-Marts in Chickasha and Duncan, and all of us who shop there know just how unadventurous the selection is at those stores.

Pumpkin Scones

First, enjoy this recipe, as it's the last sweet recipe that will be posted for some time.  Remember how I said in my last post that Mom and I are being healthy this year?  Well, we fell off the wagon in a serious, serious way with these scones.  Now we've decided we won't bake again until my birthday in February.  I guess we'll have to see how long that lasts.

The wagon-falling began innocently enough.  We had some leftover pumpkin from Sunday morning's pumpkin pancakes and didn't want it to go to waste.  You can do a lot of things with pumpkin, many of which are probably healthy, but, as you all have surely figured out by now, that's not how we roll at the Lindsey house.  We made double-frosted pumpkin scones.  They're INCREDIBLE and I suggest you don't make them because you can't not eat them.  I also suggest you go to the kitchen, prepare them now, and enjoy them for breakfast tomorrow morning.  I promise to be sympathetic when we run into each other at fat camp.

Pumpkin Pancakes

Brother Jason and his iPad came home for the weekend.  He downloaded an awesome app called Talking Tom, an animated kitty cat/voice recorder that repeats everything said in an adorable, animated kitty kind of way.  Mom and I loved it and it became Mom's vanity accessory for the weekend.  During the football game, while yelling terrible things at the 18-year-old kids that play for OU, she had it on her lap, repeating everything she said.  Tell me she's not adorably nuts.

Onto the food - every fall, Mom buys one tin of the Williams Sonoma pumpkin pancake mix and having it on Sunday mornings is a real treat.  However, because no one in our house has much self control, the mix is usually gone within a month.  We finally decided to stop being slackers, relying on others to prepare the food we can surely prepare ourselves, and find a recipe of our own.  Here's the recipe we have come up with to cure the pumpkin pancake craving.

Cranberry Pecan Swedish Tea Ring

Mom is still dealing with her cold, so she decided not to make her more-fabulous-than-fabulous cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Christmas morning.  She's so delirious, drugged out on NyQuil, that she decided I should cook Christmas breakfast.  Not being brave enough to attempt her cinnamon rolls, I decided on this cranberry pecan Swedish tea ring, a recipe that I found in Healthy Cooking.  Having never cooked something that involves yeast and rising, it took more than one attempt to get it made, but I finally succeeded.  It's delicious, so it was worth the effort.