Monster Cookies & Chili

What a glorious weekend!  The weather was absolutely wonderful and I had a great time all weekend long.  Well, mostly all weekend long.  The one drawback was that two of my brand new pumpkins were stolen off my front porch!  I keep telling myself, "they're just pumpkins. they're just pumpkins."
Anyway, great weekend all around.  Uno turns 12 tomorrow (12!) therefore we celebrated his birthday over the weekend.  At one point we had 9 boys running through the yard playing flash light tag.  Whew!  Boys can be loud and rough and quite frankly, a little disgusting;)
Alabama played Tennessee so me and Numero Uno took advantage of the boys entertaining themselves and made homemade chili and invited the neighbors over.  It was nice.  I also got to enjoy the luxury of watching the Pioneer Woman Saturday morning and got the idea of making Monster Cookies.  The attraction I have to the Pioneer Woman is that her recipes fit quite naturally into my everyday life.  For lack of proper terminology, they're not "froo froo".  I typically have the ingredients in my pantry and the results are great.  The "norm" for me is bland at best but since I've been using Pioneer Woman's recipes, my meals actually have taste.  Plus she gives great tips while cooking.
 I am aware that there is an aspect of my person that if given the job of a CSI agent would step over the dead body. Meaning there have been great things happen or given to me that I have not appreciated until YEARS later.  One of them being my mother-in-law.  She has given me many practical gifts that at first I did not care for or understand but that now I am HUGELY thankful for.  One such gift is my cast iron skillet.  Truth be told, I didn't know what to do with it.  The only memory I could conjure up of a cast iron skillet was the one in which my dad told me that once when he was a teenager his mother hit him up side the head with one.  Needless to say, mine stayed in the drawer under my oven.  Until....the Pioneer Woman.  Now I use mine weekly and love it!  My chicken has never had so much flavor. 
Besides cookies, my man made chili and Saturday night it wasn't really as thick as I like it to be.  I was looking forward to eating some leftovers after church on Sunday.  What I didn't realize was that Numero Uno had placed the chili on high to thicken it up then planned to turn it down to simmer while we were at church.  Needless to say, we arrived home to the smell of burnt chili.  He forgot to turn it off high.  Kudos to my red pot which withstood the three hour tour of fire. I was determined to have thick chili so I found a recipe from you know who:)

 “Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile.”
― William Cullen Bryant