This weekend was productive.

Roasted Butternut Squash and Shallot Soup, from Cooking Light magazine.

Rich and sweet, it was my introduction to cooking and eating butternut squash. Because of all the work involved, I'm not sure whether I'd make this recipe again, but I definitely will try other butternut squash-related recipes.

Oven-fried Chicken Strips, from Big, Bold, Beautiful Food blog.

I was in the mood for fried chicken, but not in the mood for the calories involved. I didn't use buttermilk for the binding liquid -- I actually used a mixture of Ken's Lite Honey Mustard Dressing and Country Crock. It didn't really make a good binding liquid, but it still tasted pretty good.

Diet Soda (White) Cake, from Sparkpeople.com (or any dieting site, really).

This cake was awesome. I had tried it before with Diet Coke & Devil's Food cake, and that turned out well, but there was definitely a Diet Cokey aftertaste. No soda aftertaste for the white/Sierra Mist variety whatsoever, or at least, none that I could taste. My guess is that it's because most of the recipe (and hence, most of the calories) come from the dry ingredients in the cake. So, you only end up saving about 70 calories per serving... but you don't give up anything on taste.

Gingerbread Cookies, from CookingLight.com.

I know it's a little early for gingerbread cookies (it's even a little early for Halloween cookie cutters), but I want to make gingerbread people for R's family kids for the holidays, and so I needed practice. The dough was easy enough to make (although I lacked a mixer, so I guess it could've been easier), but horrible to work with. It stuck to everything. Trying to peel the formed cat- and pumpkin- shaped cookies from the counter had disasterous results. It's a sad sight to look down at your counter and see several mangled gingerbread cats. Missing heads, missing tails, torn in half... all sorts of gingerbread cat crimes were catalogued in my kitchen that day. So here's a tip for that: DON'T EVER MAKE GINGERBREAD COOKIES AGAIN. But if you have to, just use a knife to carefully peel the cookies from the counter.

I also have to give a shout out to the icing: Betty Crocker Whipped (Fluffy White) Frosting is the equivalent of crack in a can for me. It's so... white. And fluffy. And whipped! It's wonderful. So wonderful that I ate a spoonful of it by itself. Of course, then I got sick, because I had spent the last few months trying to decrease my sugar intake; so my body did a "What the fuck is this?" and deployed stomach cramps for the rest of the night. I stand by my opinion, though: WONDERFUL.

In other exciting news, R and I are going to Indianapolis this weekend (first time in Indiana! woo, new state!) for R's cousin's baby shower -- and perhaps I'll stroll by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indy 500!) and the Museum of Miniature Houses. The weekend after that, we are visiting a good friend in NYC (and, if there is an opportunity, seeing another friend's band perform). Then, for Thanksgiving, my mom is coming to visit! Which is exciting, but since I had to buy her plane ticket, it saddens me to have to push back certain things for next year.