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I got this recipe for Pumpkin Chili from a collection of Eversave pumpkin recipes I got via email. It’s a wonderful recipe for sneaking in healthy veggies to your kids’ diet. It’s also a great way to use up all that ground meat and canned pumpkin you bought on sale.

Pumpkin Chili
Beware: it’s a large batch so you may want to freeze half. I ended up sharing it with a friend’s family.

Ingredients:

1.  4 pounds 70% once ground chuck (I used  the ground antelope we had in the freezer.)
2. 3 cans diced tomatoes with juice (I used one can and two cans equivalent of chopped up tomatoes from our garden.)
3. 16 oz. tomato sauce
4. 2 jalapeno peppers, finely chopped (I used a small can of chopped peppers.)
5. 5 TBSP chili pepper
6. 1 each yellow and orange bell pepper, sliced and roasted then finely diced (I had a jar of roasted red peppers, so I used that.)
7. 3 ears of roasted corn, sliced from the cob (Instead I used a can of corn, drained.)
8. 2 stalks celery, finely diced
9. 2 cups of cooked pumpkin (I added a cup of cooked butternut squash. Why not?)
10. Several drops Tabasco sauce (optional) (I skipped this since I wasn’t sure my friend’s family likes their chili spicy or not.)

Directions:

1. Brown the ground chuck, drain off grease.
2. Place all ingredients into a crock pot and cook on low for 10-12 hours.

Chill out with some chili books

Need a few good books to read while waiting for your chili to cook? Try these:

Armadilly Chili - For ages four to eight, a Tex-Mex version of The Little Red Hen.

West Texas Chili Monster - For ages four to eight, unexpected things happen when Mama’s rip-roarin’ chili attracts a space monster to a West Texas chili contest.

What would Halloween be without black cats? One of my favorite literary felines is Nick Bruel’s Bad Kitty, a very naughty kitty who stars in a hilarious alphabet book. When I came across the sequel, Poor Puppy, at our recent Scholastic book fair, I had to bring the book home.

Poor Puppy features a happy-go-lucky puppy who wants to play with Bad Kitty. Bad Kitty is a smart feline, and stays out of the way while Poor Puppy destroys the house. Again, Bruel gives us a wonderful ABC book but this time includes numbers 1-26.

Kids ages three to eight will enjoy Poor Puppy and Bad Kitty’s antics. And parents will be scared silly by the destruction these two manage to cause. Who knew an ABC book could be a cautionary tale?

C is for Cupcake

Now let’s count how many fall pumpkin cupcakes we can make…and eat!

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The Invisible, a young adult novel by Mats Wahl and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was first published  in Sweden and made into a movie there. A U.S. film version will open in April 2007.

It’s about Hilmer, a 15-year-old boy in a small Swedish town, who slowly realizes that he has become invisible and is believed missing. A police detective named Harald Fors arrives at school that very morning to investigate Hilmer’s disappearance. Hilmer grows frightened and realizes that he’s starting to forgett things including what happened to him two nights earlier.

Detective Fors suspects foul play by a group of skinheads. As Fors scours the village and interviews area residents for clues, he begins to piece together the puzzle of Hilmer’s disappearance. Meanwhile Hilmer waits to discover what has happened to him.

Teens and adults will appreciate how Wahl slowly gives us - and main character Hilmer - clues about what happened. While you and Dective Fors have your suspicions, it isn’t until the end that the author lets us know what really happened. The Invisible reminds me a little of the narration in Alice Seabold’s The Lovely Bones - slightly creepy but very unique. Teenagers will enjoy this murder mystery and find The Invisible a hard book to put down.

Click here for more YA book reviews.

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One of the best stories about magical beasts is Beauty and the Beast of course! Your kids have probably seen the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, which I adore. However, Lucie is scared of the beast and the ending, so we don’t watch it much even though the music and animation is wonderful.

This is a shame because Belle is my idea of a good feminist storybook heroine. She’s smart and loves to read. She also loves her father and friends and is very loyal to them. Also, for once in a Disney flick, Belle doesn’t fall in love with the good looking guy, Gaston. Instead, Belle goes for the ugly Beast because of his character and heart. Belle’s a decent roll model for girls, which is why I love the story so much.

Usborne Books has a beautifully illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast. For children seven years and up, their version is based on the original version by Gabrielle de Villeneuve written in 1740 and a retelling by another French writer, Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, which was written in 1756. The story revolves about Beauty’s father stealing a red rose from the Beast’s garden.

And you’ll be a beast for these pumpkin muffins (with Weight Watchers POINTS info for all us moms trying to stay trim and healthy).

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Halloween is a time when children (and some adults - you know who you are!) let their imaginations run wild. A book that reminds me of this is What Eddie Can Do by Wilfried Gebhard. Eddie is so busy exploring rain forests, traveling through space, and flying with birds that he doesn’t have time to tie his shoes.

Actually, he’s avoiding learning how to tie his sneakers, but finally conquers the “double-tailed monster” with the help of his mom.

In What Eddie Can Do, kids ages four to eight will appreciate Eddie’s vivid imagination. Parents will relate to all the ways Eddie will avoid something hard and slightly scary. All will like the step-by-step “how to tie your shoes” illustrations. (This title is available in Spanish as Lo Que Eduardo Sabe Hacer from Kane/Miller Book Publishers.)

Now how about a Jack-O-Lantern Smoothie courtesy of Horizon Organic?

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