Cajun Chicken Pasta

This is one of those recipes that I love, love, love.  I found it, as usual, on Pinterest, via Skinnytaste.  The recipe can be found here.

It has SO much flavor, the veggies add a lot of good, crunch and texture, and it tastes so good.  It also has the husband's stamp of approval which is big for me when I'm trying to eat healthy meals, but make sure he enjoys it too--typically he just eats twice as much as I do, so it works well!

Here is how my version looked:

nom nom nom

I used bowtie pasta to make it since we had some leftover...and I thought it looked really cute, plus made it easy to eat!  The best part is not only that it tastes delicious, but once you have the ingredients chopped and prepped, it comes together so easily.

Banana Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

I got a couple of comments about  the cookies from my post looked, and wanted to share the recipe!

The recipe can be found here at the Six Sisters' Stuff blog, which is where I discovered it on Pinterest!

A few notes/thoughts on these:

• I only used about 1 cup of chocolate chips...it was what I had on hand, and I still think they're great!  Just had to make sure a few made it into each scoop

• I used 1 cup of oats, but for some reason, my cookies do not have the same "look" that the photo shows on Pinterest. I would probably add more next time for extra texture--maybe 1 1/2 cups, see how the batter looks and go up from there, etc.

• I had to use about 1 1/2 medium/small-ish bananas to get to half a cup, great banana taste, but not too overbearing!

• I *did* use unsalted butter, as the recipe calls for, so that wasn't what changed the look/crisp of them, but either way, they taste great and I love them!  It was a great way to use up the leftover bananas from this week.

• If you added in walnuts, these would be even better! 

Top 5 of the Week

Here are five great moments of this week--

1.  I had a great job interview, and feel good about the potential there.

2.  I bought a new Camelbak water bottle on sale at Target for $12, and I'm totally obsessed with it!

3.  Tried out a new recipe-Chocolate Chip Banana Oatmeal Cookies.  They were/are delicious.

Said delicious cookies.  

4.  Tonight we have plans to see Argo, and we are both really excited, which rarely happens when it comes to movie choices!

5.  We registered for a 5K on Thanksgiving morning this week.  Neither of us are great or "real" runners, whatever that may mean, but we are excited to have some good motivation to work out together and hopefully do more in the future.

Have a great weekend enjoying fall!

New Additions

We recently put up two 3-foot long shelves above our television.  I really love the placement of them, but I'm having trouble curating what to put on them--it seems like it should be much easier to find knick-knacks to rest up there, but the shelves are very narrow (about 2 inches deep), so they aren't designed for much besides frames and other "flat items"!

Here are "the shelves", well one of them.  I just noticed it looks a little
crooked here, but it isn't in real life!  See what I mean?  The composition is just "off"

That said, I think I may experiment with moving other pieces of framed art we have around the house so I can try new items on the shelves.

I got some goodies in the mail this week--most exciting is the addition of my "medium"-sized lantern from Pottery Barn that my sister and her family got me for my birthday!  We already received the large and small sized lanterns as wedding gifts--and I love how you can change them up they are for each season, plus they can also go outdoors one day when we actually have outdoor space.  All three sizes I have plus the extra-large lantern can be found here:  Pottery Barn Malta Lanterns

My little fall tableau  going on with the lanterns!

I am still waiting on my October Birchbox to arrive, and can't wait for a round of awesome beauty samples!  And I should mention here how awesome their customer service is--I didn't receive my first two months of my subscription (August and September), and since the boxes are now out of stock, they are giving me November and December gratis!