I can confirm that the only thing better than coming home from college for a holiday is going home for a weekend when you're an adult. Coming home as an adult - *you* are the holiday. I am the holiday, everyone. At least in my mother's eyes. The second I say "hey, can I stop by this weekend?" it's like "YAAAAAAAAAAAS!!!!! *confetti and airhorns* I'M GOING TO GO GROCERY SHOPPING!!!!!! WHAT CHEESE DO YOU WANT? DOESN'T MATTER I'LL BUY YOU 10 DIFFERENT TYPES. DO YOU NEED NEW COMFY PAJAMAS??? I BOUGHT YOU NEW SHOES!!!!!!" Given my mom is better than everyone else on Earth, I can still say with a degree of certainty that going home to your parents' house as an adult is THE BEST.
SO, since Rob and I were in Amherst for a football game anyway on Saturday, we figured we'd hangout at my parents' house for the night afterwards. For the past year I've legitimately cried every time I've left my mom so I figure the more "mom time" I get, the less likely I am to burst out in tears and cling to her like a baby koala when I have to go back to Boston. This woman, God love her, went out and bought literally everything pumpkin she could find (and a whole bunch of halloween gummy worms for rob lol). I told her I wanted to try out this recipe for Pumpkin Alfredo that I found & she went and bought/prepped all the ingredients so Rob & I could make it (because I whine a lot about wanting a bigger kitchen and she knows we love cooking. She is wonderful). We're finishing up the pasta and she goes "oh and Dad's out back grilling filets! That will go with it, right?" as if I have ever turned down a filet in my life.
Couple things with this recipe:
1) The lack of gluten in this pasta is why it's looking so choppy in the picture - if anyone has any recommendations on a good brand of GF pasta (especially fettuccine and angel hair) that doesn't break easily, please let me know!
2) Just go full heavy cream for the sauce. Alfredo is not the dish to try to make healthy - you're cooking with like, almost an entire stick of butter anyway. I find that most cream based sauces tend to separate MUCH more easily when you cook with half & half - not worth it! Enjoy the calories.
3) Make sure you're using grated, not shredded, parmesan in the sauce so it doesn't clump up. (Unless you're grating your own! In that case anything works, the thinner the better).
We didn't have any fresh parsley so we used marjoram instead - it's a touch more earthy that parsley is but worked really well with the pumpkin flavor!
Not only did I eat like, 4 servings of that, but my mom made probably 3 dozen caramel-chocolate chip cookies and if you've never added caramel chips to a cookie before BRUHHHHH I ate so many I'm still bloated and its been 3 days. We're going to call it "bloated" not "gained 5lbs in 24 hours."
As an added bonus to the free food and mommy-time, I've grown to actually really love my house/the area I grew up in. Not Holyoke, but the area of it that I grew up in lol. I used to feel so isolated out there; I hated the woods and the dirt and nature and the QUIET oh my GOD I HATED how quiet it was out there. Now, as I sit on the T for 2 hours a day and sirens have become white noise, I'm realizing how lucky I was to grow up on a lake in a valley surrounded by mountains in the woods. It wasn't that isolated, it was just like, country bumpkin living. Country boyyyyyy I love youuuuuu.
Fall has always been my favorite time of year. In western Massachusetts, it's particularly beautiful & I really didn't realize that until I moved out here. The lil dying trees are gorgeous, there's always a nice breeze, the air is #crisp, and my parents always have a fire going in our backyard. My mom and I woke up before everyone else, let the dogs out to run, and headed down to our deck near the lake to have hot chocolate and hangout for a bit. Very scenic and cozy. This is how much of a hero my mom is - she bought me oat milk and pumpkin spice flavored marshmallows to go with my salted caramel hot chocolate. If you've never had smash mallows before, they're super cute & SO good. They come in a bunch of different flavors & I've been eating them like a monster since we found them wrapped in little individual packages for halloween.
My parents are in the process of selling our house right now & I want to be able to get back up there as much as I can before then. Now that I'm living in Boston & neither of them work in Holyoke, it doesn't make a ton of sense for them to stay out there but, ugh, we had SO much fun at that house. I'm excited for my parents to live closer to me at some point in the future, but definitely going to miss my house. Not going to miss Holyoke, want to clarify that, but I will miss our little spot there.
This weekend Rob and I will be crashing at his parents house & maybe someday we'll spend the weekend at our apartment again (during the fall i.e football season, not likely). Columbus Day weekend we're heading up to Portland, then it's more Amherst games, more free food, and the last of my arteries to clog - very busy fall ahead of us. Here's hoping the Patriots stop sucking & I start utilizing some pasta substitutes again so all can once more be right in this world.