Weekending - September 25, 2020

It's hard to believe that we just had the last weekend in September for 2020.  This is such a great time of year.  I hate to see it go by so quickly.  Let's rewind and reflect on how we spent our weekend ~

The highlights from the last few days include two new recipes.  They were both winners and I'm going to be sharing them with you later this week.  I think you're going to love them too!  

Cast Iron Skillet Apple Crisp

Olive Garden Chicken Pasta

My favorite little pumpkin patch, Backroads Pumpkin Patch, had some pumpkins out this weekend and I couldn't wait to bring some home.  

Saturday night our son and daughter-in-law came over for dinner.  We tried the Olive Garden Chicken Pasta and it got thumbs up from everyone!  The Cast Iron Apple Crisp was dessert and everyone loved it too!  The best part was dessert was served outside around the firepit.  Love fall evenings!

I also finished my book club book - 

This is one of those books I would probably never have read it if hadn't been the book club selection - and I would have really missed out.  What an eye-opening book!  Have you read it?  If not, put it on your list.  Here's the summary from Amazon ~

In her debut novel Etaf Rum tells the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community—a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.

"Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.”

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

Hope your week is off to a good start.  I'm excited to share the posts I have planned for you this week, so please drop back in.