Cooking adventures during the holidays

I love to cook and to bake. But oftentimes, I get home from work and ugh, it's just too much to get myself to cook anything fancy. Most of the time, I resort to the tried and tested meals I used to make in university: ramen, rice and some quick stir fry veggies, that sort of thing. But during the holidays, I seemed to have more motivation and more inspiration to cook stuff. So tah dah! Here are some of the sweet goodies I have made this holiday break:

Bacon cornbread: inspired from my time in the south and from a love of anything bacon. It's just cornbread mix with corn and crisp bacon. And it's in my fancy new silicon tray that I recently bought from Superstore, it's so legit!

Sausage stuffed bell peppers: Italian sausage mixed with some panko, cheese, one egg, garlic and salt and pepper. Stuff that into the halves of the peppers of your choice and bake for about half an hour and tah dah!

Spinach and cheese quiche: I always thought quiche was a little funky. It's egg but not really and it's a pie but not really. A splosh of spinach in each tart with some cheese and then pour an egg, flour, milk mixture into the crusts and bake. Better the first day but still good for leftovers.

A random mix of stuff I had in my fridge: linguine mixed with spinach and tomatoes in oil/oregano/thyme, brown sugar/lemon baked salmon and baked sweet tomato.

Spaghetti squash: my co-worker told me there was a type of squash that came out like a pasta so I wanted to give it a try. You bake the squash for about half an hour cute side down in the oven and then when you scoop it out, it comes out like strands of pasta. I mixed that with some ground beef, spinach, garlic and then I wanted to give it a bit of spice so I added some paprika and cayenne pepper. It's lighter than a pasta but still as filling and it's healthier too!

Mm gingerbread cookies: these were the first cookies I ever made that required me to roll the dough and use cookie cutters. I was stoked! I got to decorate the cookies with Smarties hehe except I went a little overboard with some of them and had to re-distribute them so they would be a bit more consistent and uniform among all the cookies.

Cranberry chocolate chip oatmeal cookies: pretty much exactly as they sound but they are super chewy and go great with a cup of hot chocolate :)

Shortbread cookies with a glazed cherry on top: SO much butter was involved in the making of these cookies. I refuse to divulge the amount because I fear the judge-y looks I will get. Whatever, they taste so good and literally melt in your mouth.

Stuffed acorn squash: this was my first foray into the squash department. This is an acorn squash that I halved and then put into the oven cut side down. Then I stir fried some broccoli, mushrooms and bacon. When the squash was done, I scooped it out and mixed it with the veggies then re-stuffed it back into the shells, layered it with cheese and put it into the oven until the cheese was melted.