5 Favorite Things: October 2011

It’s time again for our monthly list of 5 Favorite Things! Fall food is in full force right now and that is clearly evident by this month’s selections.

1. Squash
For whatever reason, Fall makes us crave all foods involving squash. We’ve already made Spaghetti Squash with Veggie Ragù once this year and we have two squash meals on the menu for this week. Don’t worry, we’ll share the recipes with you. There is just something comforting about eating warm squash for dinner when it’s cool outside!

2. Simply Apple Juice
We know apple juice is a hot topic right now, thanks to Dr. Oz. He says there is too much arsenic in apple juice and we are killing our kids. The FDA says it’s fine. We happen to lean towards agreeing with the FDA, since it appears Dr. Oz’s study did not differentiate between inorganic arsenic (harmful) and organic arsenic (not harmful). Still, we want to make sure we are giving our kids the best and that’s why we started buying Simply Apple Juice. The apples that they use come from either the US or Canada and it is not made from concentrate. Not to mention the fact that it tastes incredible!!! It almost has a cider taste to it. Our kids love drinking it cold or hot. It’s the perfect way to start a Fall morning.

3. Giada’s Classic Minestrone
It’s no secret here that we love Giada‘s food. Our DVR is probably 60% full of her shows! When Target started carrying a line of her food, we were slightly skeptical. We thought there was no way her amazing recipes could be turned into a delicious boxed meal. I am so glad that we were wrong! Our favorite meal that we have tried is the Classic Minestrone Soup. All of the ingredients are real!!! There isn’t some random weird ingredient in there that we can’t pronounce. We like to add ground turkey sometimes to make the soup a little more hearty for our family of five!

4. Giada’s Espresso Roast Ground Coffee
Last month, we purchased a Bialetti Moka Express. Our lives have forever changed. We are making lattes all the time now! Sometimes we have them for breakfast, sometimes we have them for a mid-day treat, sometimes we have them for dessert. Don’t worry, we haven’t had more than one latte per day — yet. Of course, some mornings we still crave a classic pot of coffee, so we go that route. Needless to say, we are blowing through coffee like crazy in our house right now and that can get expensive. We wanted to find ground coffee that was both affordable and good for either lattes or traditional coffee. The cheap coffee tasted, well, like cheap coffee. The expensive coffee (Illy) is great, but it’s way too much for how fast we are using it. Enter Giada’s Espresso roast. Like I said…we love all things Giada. It tastes great and it doesn’t cost a fortune. After going through one bag in less than a week, we realized that we found our new favorite coffee roast!

5. Coffee Ice Cream
Like we aren’t already getting enough coffee in our lives…we discovered that we love coffee ice cream. We’ve had bad coffee ice cream in the past, but both Edy’s and Breyer’s coffee ice cream is really good! We…uh…had to try both…you know, for scientific testing. I know ice cream isn’t really a Fall food, but in our family it’s always ice cream season!