Onion rings and donuts

It's so good to be home. Did I mention that yet? One of the things I was most excited about this year was to get to try some new recipes! Mainly because I finally have time to do so, but also because my mom is paying for the groceries (and some ingredients can be expensive for a poor grad student). I've been baking for the past 3 days, so don't be surprised if the next several posts are about food!

On our first day back, the theme was fried foods. Bud wanted to make homemade onion rings, and I wanted to make homemade pumpkin donuts. We were doing them at the same time, so it got a little crowded in the kitchen, but both turned out to be delicious.

For the onion rings, I sliced the onions thinly, then we soaked the onions in buttermilk before coating them with a flour mixture. Who knew that buttermilk was the key to making your own onion rings? Not me; at least, not until now.

We had burgers and onion rings for dinner. Not only did we have onion rings with our burgers, we put them ON our burgers. With barbecue sauce, too. SO GOOD! Ever since I got the Whisky River BBQ burger at Red Robin one time, I've loved burgers with onion rings and barbecue sauce.

The perfect ending to a good meal is a good dessert. The pumpkin donuts hit the spot. As I mentioned before, I've been addicted to all things pumpkin this year, so I was excited to try pumpkin donuts. I had tried Krispy Kreme pumpkin donuts earlier this year and I wasn't impressed. These donuts are much better!

The recipe for the donuts can be found here: The Family Kitchen. They aren't hard to make and since they're cake donuts, no yeast is required. I didn't have a donut cutter, so I just used a large cup for the big circle and a little protein scoop for the middle. The buttermilk glaze was the icing on top (literally!).