It has really begun to feel like fall now. The sun is coming up later and setting earlier, the air is cooler and the leaves are falling off of the trees. We have started a new homeschooling year and I am feeling myself being pulled more and more toward the kitchen. Yesterday, Autumn and I came up with a new delicious vegan burger recipe.

I have been wanting to make a new burger recipe since we love the Smoky Hickory Black Bean and Quinoa Burgers so much, but I wanted to make a recipe that was free of any genetically modified ingredients and sugar and that actually had veggies in it. I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew I wanted quinoa in it again and instead of beans, I decided red lentils would be great to hold it together and add a yummy flavor. We have been enjoying red lentils a lot these days cooked with vegetable broth.

These were sooo good! We fried them up and served them with beans we had in our freezer from the garden and raw vegetables and hummus. Meals like these remind me of why I love being vegan! Getting to eat and enjoy a lot of good food and feel good afterwards too!

We’ve also been baking too. We attempted to come up with a recipe for baked banana doughnuts which failed to rise properly. And I mean really failed… like pancakes. Pancakes shaped like doughnuts. Yea… So, stubborn as I am, even though I was tired, I tried it again and it failed again, just not as badly as it failed the first time around. So we had two containers of banana pancake doughnuts. They still tasted yummy and the girls enjoyed eating them, but I have nothing to share on that… yet. Baking with syrup and with mashed bananas is tough, but I think that would be a yummy recipe if I can get it to turn out.

We also made a double recipe of my favorite trail mix cookies and some yummy carrot walnut muffins (again doubled). Yesterday I also made some apricot truffles. Needless to say, it has been good eating around here these days. 🙂

The potatoes from our garden are ready now too, which are great with the burgers and just great in general! It is always amazing to me how different (better) fresh, local food is!

Autumn also wanted to try her hand at a recipe by herself now that I have been teaching her about measurement and how to read recipes. We did some learning the other morning about measurement and how to add and subtract fractions and how to make the different measurements (3/4 cup is 1/2 cup + 1/4 etc.) and she was so eager to try it out. She made the soft ginger molasses cookies from my recipe book and so we have that to look forward to tasting after dinner tonight.

The measurement learning was quite an adventure. We used noodles and it was super messy! All the girls had a lot of fun though!

There were noodles EVERYWHERE! After that I had to take a nap.

Aside from all the yummy food and recipe adventures, there have been crafts. Oh my, have there been crafts!

We did leaf art with the different colored beautiful leaves that we collect on our walks, decorated our own plates (with Sharpies), made our own mailboxes out of cereal boxes and made paper plate fish.

The girls really loved making their own plates with the Sharpie markers. Each girl drew their favorite food all along the edge of the plate and them self in the center.

It was a lot of fun to decorate these plates (an idea I saw on pinterest a long time ago), but the Sharpie does still rub off even though we baked them, so they are for decorative purposes only and not for eating on, unfortunately.

The girls are also so terribly creative on their own which always blows my mind. The other day it was super windy outside and while Serafina was napping and I was reading, they were inspired to make their own kites and fly them.

Autumn has been making her own recipes. She made a super sweet juice recipe which was two different types of juice mixed together with some maple syrup and she also thought up a recipe for sugar water milk, made from almond milk, syrup and water. She reminds me a lot of me when I was a girl.

She also wanted to try out the sewing machine again and so I found some papers here for her to practice on.

Homeschooling is going so well so far. Kesa is an eager little learner all of a sudden. She will wake up in the morning and right away say, “I’m going to do my work.” We got her some books that use a dry erase marker and wipe clean so that she can use them over and over again. I figured that she would love the idea of doing work if it was fun like that and she did! I used to have to fight with her to do anything, but she is growing up so much and really starting to be a big kid.

Autumn is still plugging away at her Fruit Fairies book series.

And Serafina is still looking cute.

I love waking up to that cute face.

It was a nice surprise to find our sidewalk decorated with chalk drawings too. Kesa’s are mostly of cats of course.

Autumn wrote the things she loves. I love my mom, I love my dad, I love my sisters, I love my house, I love my cat, I love going swimming.

Today they were outside making a house for the cat out of sticks from the yard tied together with chives.

And the cat loves it! 🙂

Their imaginations never cease to amaze me! There has been so much going on that I had to sit and write this long post to remember it all and put all the pictures in it.

I wanted to share the burger recipe too, but this post is so long now that I will put it into my next one, so stay tuned.

Life is beautiful and I am grateful! 🙂