Let's play catch-up

Last you heard from me, I was preparing to fork over a few good holiday recipes and get a little housework done. And then my hard drive crashed. Fatal, nothing spinning, dead as a doornail hard drive crash. So yeah. It's up and running now, and I took lots of pictures in the meantime...

Baking Day
I had such high hopes for delivering these great recipes with step by step pictures. And I started out in the right vein.

Here's the sifted flour and butter/sugar for pecan butter balls-- those melt in your mouth powdered sugar covered cookies:



Here's the butter for 4 recipes worth of almond English toffee:


And the melting sugar and milk for candied pecans:


But then, before I knew it...Oops! All done!

Bagged, canned and ready to go.

But I will still give you one recipe...

Orange-Candied Pecans and Cranberries

1 cup packed brown sugar
3 Tbs condensed milk
1 Tbs butter
1 tsp orange zest
2 cups of pecans
1 cup dried cranberries

Combine brown sugar and condensed milk in saucepan over medium-high heat (see pic above). Bring to 234ºF (softball stage).


Once you've reached 234, turn off heat and stir in butter and orange zest. Add pecans and cranberries until coated. Pour out on wax paper.


Once cooled, break pecan halves apart and bag. I ended up adding a little more than 2 cups of pecans and however many cranberries looked good. You can see that the above is more than one recipe. That's maybe 4? Anyway, easiest thing in the world and magical.

Holiday Business
The kiddo finally got to paint the ornaments I mentioned in the last post:


We hosted Christmas Eve dinner and munched on ham for several days of leftovers. For Christmas, Adam's folks got us a new toaster/convection oven. I'm loving it so far. And my mother got us an espresso machine. It's a much nicer one than I'd have ever bought for myself, and being a former Starbucks employee/Kool-Aid drinker, I've been having a great time fiddling with it and making fancy beverages. It's a wonder that with the DAILY whole milk lattes since Christmas morning I haven't gained 20 pounds. It was lovely.

For New Year we went to friend's house. She has a passel of kids so there was much Rock Band being played and much rum punch being imbibed. By the grownups, of course. Fizzy grape juice for the little ones and ummy yummy Ro-tel dip.

House Business
We did actually get a little done. I got a couple of coats of poly on the countertop trim and made a little progress on the remaining kitchen crown (one little fussy corner is giving me hell). I also started painting that hellish green window in the kitchen, at which point we made some decisions. The kitchen is being finished in alkyd paint. If we lived in a perfect world, I would do the trim throughout the house the same way. But there's circumstances beyond my control. First, I was told by two POs ago that they stripped most of the trim. It now only has one or two layers of paint on it. This was less than ten years ago, and they were living in the house. It's not a high gloss. I'm betting it's latex to begin with. Also, WE live in the house and alkyd is stinky and toxic. And finally, I would have to confine the cats for DAYS depending on the weather and I'm just not interested. We've already given the baseshoe a thin coat of alkyd, so I'll probably want to sand and prime with Zinsser 123 to make sure the latex will stick. Eh. I'm ok with it.

Adam got the garage cleaned and fairly organized, which was a feat of mega proportions and we got the basic box of the gable vent built:



The slats are one more recycling of the garage door boards. And the 2X4s were salvaged from another project. We'll get it permanently set and then trim around it. First I want to paint it. This thing was a monster-- 42" across, and nobody makes a stock size that's horizontal like that.

That's the main stuff. Mostly, we sat on our butts or cleaned or baked. And going back to work is tough now. Really tough.

What's the best kind of Christmas tree?

Are you partial to Douglas or Fraser?

I'm partial to free, myself.

About 5 or 6 years ago we found that Lowe's always overstocks their trees and if we wait until the final days of Christmas, we get a beautiful, full, perfectly shaped beauty for $5-$15. This has worked for us, every year since, without fail. This year, we went to Lowe's on Saturday to find 6 scraggly FULL PRICE trees-- short trees that lacked a discernable top or bottom. We prepared ourselves for 2 outcomes: a very expensive tree or a the first fake one of my life. Wait, I take that back. There was one year where I had a 2 foot fiber optic rotating tabletop tree that changed color. I bought it at the grocery store.

Anyway, We found a lovely Fraser fir at Home Depot. It ran about $45-- the signs were stacked up on the ground, so we were hoping it was on sale, but we weren't holding our breath.

We looked around the store at a few other things, and when we got back to pay for it, the tree was freshly cut, stray branches were removed, the whole thing was bagged and ready to load...and then they sent us on our way, with pocketbooks none the lighter. They told us that employees get these trees for free, and sometimes they like to just give one away. We must have looked very pitiful, indeed. It was quite a Christmas miracle.

And it is a lovely, old-fashioned tree.


We completed the decorating this weekend and tried out a new pecan glaze recipe that I will absolutely share this week. The kiddo and I (mostly the kiddo) painted some salt dough ornaments we made several years ago-- I'll post pics of those as well. We found some holiday-themed cookie presses at an antique shop 2 years ago and made a bunch of the ornaments. Then my father was in the hospital, and last year was my family's first year without Dad, not to mention the fact that we were in a mad race to get moved into the house...Life got in the way. But they are ready for distribution this year.

Lots more to do-- we are hosting Christmas Eve dinner, as Thanksgiving was such a success, thanks to the dishwasher! This means a ham and all the trimmings to prepare. The blog may just go into recipe-only mode before this week is over!

"The Crooner"

This is my grandmother's response every time I say Bing Crosby's name. Boy was he one hell of a whistler.



This is my favorite holiday movie. A Christmas Story is great, It's a Wonderful Life is a Classic, but this one has been so overshadowed by that showy Danny Kaye nightmare White Christmas. It always comes on in the middle of the night on a weekday when I can't watch. It's out on a special edition 3 disc DVD set now-- I've had it in my basket 3 times at the store this season, and yet I put it back on the shelf every time. It seems like such a frivolous waste of money. But I had a tooth pulled yesterday, so I'm going to make this a little Get Well present to myself, I think.

Not that I'll have much time to watch it over the break if we get everything done that we hope to. Which we won't. The To-Do list is always longer than what can be reasonably achieved. But it would be super nice to get the kitchen countertop trim installed and the kitchen window and door painted white to eliminate all traces of that awful green. Caulk the trim in there. We also need to fill in that ghost door. I would LOVE to have the hole in our ceiling patched. We'd also really like to build some basic bookshelves in the dining room below the buffet window sill. We have TEN boxes of books. 10. TEN. Ten boxes of homeless books.

And I still have holiday baking and ornament making left. And the Christmas tree! We've yet to buy a Christmas tree. So much left to do.

On a good note, I did get that red ribbon for the gas light while wandering around Walgreens filling my heavy duty painkiller prescription post-tooth-pull yesterday This makes the outdoor decorations complete.

Holly Dayz

Well, we finally got a little bit of the holiday spirit going on in the house. Gingerbread...


And lights:


That last shot is with a high shutter speed. I just thought it was kinda sweet. I also think that gas light in the front is just screaming for a big red bow. Maybe I'll get to it yet this year. The previous owners had nails all along the eaves, so we can't claim this one for ourselves completely, but it has made me disproportionately happy. My dad only did lights about twice the whole time I was growing up. This is a long time coming.

Adam got a ton of raking done over the weekend and the kiddo and I got the patio cleaned up ahead of a winter storm they're predicting may come through here. Great timing, considering I really need to get to my dentist tomorrow-- an hour away. I had a crown fall off over Thanksgiving, and we decided I should just get a bridge. apparently the crown's been loose for a while. But I decided to wait until the first of the year so I can use flex health savings account dollars. Then the crown fell off again this weekend and won't stay on at all. Sigh.

Good news is 2 weeks off of work coming right up. I may be half toothless for the holidays, but I will be watching daytime TV. Last year I was refinishing the floors and drywalling the kitchen. this year? Oprah. Tyra. Days of Our Lives.

This is gonna be the Best Christmas Ever.