Fall is here!

The nights here have officially gotten cooler.  We open our windows all day and don't need AC which is great for my electric bill.  It officially feels like fall weather, which is my favorite.  To kick it off, I decided to make a fall dinner.  This included pork, acorn squash, and roasted veggies.  I've never had acorn squash before so this was completely new to me.

For the pork, I made a marinade and let it sit in the fridge for about 7 hours.  Whole Foods had a sale on boneless butterflied pork chops so I grabbed a few of those.  The marinade consisted of:

honey

brown sugar

lime juice

salt

pepper

cayenne pepper

cumin

olive oil

garlic

dijon mustard

To make it, I just put everything into a bowl and whisked it together 

Since the pork was butterflied, I went ahead and cut them in half to make half chops so I ended up with 6 separate pieces.  

The chops went into a ziplock bag with the marinade and it was turned a couple of times to coat before going into the fridge.  

When it was time for dinner, I started with the roasted veggies and the acorn squash since they would take longer to cook.  For veggies, I used zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and bell pepper. I cut them up and put them in a baking dish, sprinkled salt and pepper and drizzled olive oil. 

I originally wanted to add the acorn squash to the mix but instead, I decided to roast it on its own.  I cut the squash in half and took the seeds out.  First, I sprinkled kosher salt on the squash.  Then, in the cavity, of each half, I added some butter and topped it with brown sugar.  I thought it'd be a nice touch to sprinkle some pumpkin pie spice over the tops as well to add extra spice. 

These went in the oven with the roasted veggies.  They cooked for about an hour.

While the veggies were cooking, I grilled the pork chops.  I cooked them for about 15 minutes total and then let them sit for about 10 minutes. They came out about medium which is how we usually eat our pork.  For some reason my grill marks never come out when I make pork.  I don't turn the meat a lot..but they always just brown, which I guess is ok as long as they taste good.

This past weekend on our way back from the mountains, we stopped at Tommyknockers Brewery and got a Pumpkin Ale.  They gave the beer a brown sugar, pumpkin spice rim which was delicious with the beer.  We are a big fan of pumpkin anything and bought a 6 pack of the beer and brought it home with us.  In honor of fall and everything, Eric decided to recreate that rim and paired dinner with the pumpkin beer.

The melted butter/sugar mixture in the acorn squash so kind of amazing.  I ended up making "mashed squash" and mashing everything together with the melted butter.  The brown sugar went really well with the sweetness of the pork.  I think the pork had a little too much cumin for me so I think next time I'll use a little less of that but overall it was great.  You can't really ever go wrong with roasted veggies and I think they went really well with everything since there were so many sweet flavors in the pork and squash, they calmed everything down a bit.  The beer was great and the sugar rim was delicious and also paired well with the brown sugar/spiced theme of the meal.

I must say, I'm pretty excited for fall weather so I can make fall meals.