From One Murloc Productions: At least I got Chicken! - or how to BBQ your bird

Grrr... Brian snuck in a non-Jo-approved transition on this video.  My bad video production sense is tingling >:-[ Beware the pinwheel of death!

On the 85th day of cookies...

Ok, so I've given up on the whole day or Christmas day of cookies thing.  Too much work!  So, since my last cookie post, Brian, Mom and I have made the following:

Lemon-Honey Drop Cookies: These are one of my staples every year.  They are so versatile.  I have made them orange flavored and lemon-lime flavored as well and they turn out great!

Spritz Cookies: Mom dragged over her cookie press and made dozens of these small butter cookies that we decorated with colored sugar and other fun things.

Peppermint Swirls: I found this recipe in a Betty Crocker magazine you can get at the checkout at the grocery store.  It's a pretty easy recipe that is a basic shortbread dough which is divided in half and then one half is flavored with peppermint and colored red and then rolled with the plain dough to make the swirls. As you can see, the swirls take some practice.

Oatmeal Cranberry Sour Cream Bars:  I found this in in the same book as the Peppermint Swirls.  I wanted to make a bar and this was a nice simple recipe, plus is called for craisins and I LOVE those!

Chai Tea Shortbread: I found the next two recipes on the Food Network website from the show 5 Ingredient Fix.  A pretty good little recipe over all and the writer offers some good options to changing the recipe slightly such as adding nuts.

Almond Shortbread: This cookie uses the same recipe as the one above, but instead of using pecans as she suggested, I went for almonds and replaced the vanilla with almond extract.

I have at least one more recipe to go, so I'll post that another day, but whew!  Do you think we've made enough cookies?

On the second day of cookies...

So Saturday was our annual Cookie Day at Lars and Tara's.  Each year we get together and the girls make cookies together while the boys play on the Wii. There are certain staples that we pretty much make every year, but then we change up a few recipes every year to try out news things and try to perfect our output.  This year we made: Maple Date Bars, Sugar Cut Out Cookies, Buckeyes, Oatmeal Cookies and Ginger Cookies.

Below are Heather's Buckeyes.  They are made of graham crackers, peanut butter and butter, rolled into balls and then dipped in chocolate.  They are an every year undertaking.  Yeah, these don't leave our house...

We also make chocolate crinkles almost every year.  They are one of my absolute favorites going back to when I was a kid and mom and I made them with varying success in her very old olive green stove.

 

Isn't Lucy so cute?   She did a very good job cleaning up all the dough from the buckeyes that fell on the floor.  She's a helper! 

And Erin is looking very domestic... not to mention angelic.  Something is out of place here...

Luke slowly putting a buckeye out of it's misery.  He's so fast, all I got was a blur of him and a nice picture if Kristin.

Around 5, I headed out to my friend Jared's annual Christmas party.  No matter how hard we try, these two annual traditions seem to end up being on the same day.  But, Jared's party is for another blog post and another day.

On the first day of cookies, my oven gave to me...

I went to mom and dad's after work to start Cookie Extravaganza 2009.   We weren't particularly productive as it was a work night for me, but we got a few dozen of my assigned cookies done and one batch of a set from mom.

My cookies: Molasses Cookies

Mom's cookies: Double Chocolate Chews

Brian joined us for dinner and even helped out with dough for the first batch. 

Mr. Accuracy hard at work!

The cookie scoop or disher is God's gift to drop cookies.  It saves soooo much time and effort.  Especially when you are tripling batches.

I think Brian was getting sick of our shenanigans by this point.  Especially since I kept commenting that he was rolling too slowly and if he didn't hurry up he wouldn't earn his $.10 an hour pay.

Cute little balls of molasses cookie dough, just waiting to meet their oven-y doom!

 

As you can see, things got a little silly (as they normally do).  Mom trying to figure out her new cookies press which looks like it can shoot lazerbeams **pew pew**

Then Brian decided to go home... **pout**

After Brian left mom and I yacked away for a few more hours and managed to get some more work done before I meandered home at around 11pm.  Here's an example of the finish product for the Molasses cookies:

10 Things I Am Thankful For

This is such a great 10 on Tuesday. For most of November I kept on seeing people on Facebook and Twitter talking about all the things they are thankful for. While I know I could do at least one status update a day with something or someone I am thankful for, I just didn't seem to find the time to actually do it. So, I guess this week's 10 on Tuesday is my opportunity. There have been so many awesome things for me to be thankful in the past year. Here is just a small list of them:

1) All the wonderful people who are part of my life - I can't even begin to list all of the people who are dear to me, so I'm not going to try.  Some people I see everyday, some less than once a year.  I am so blessed to have such caring friends and family, thank you all for being there for me.

2) Warm, purring cats - To me a house without a cat isn't a home.  I have had a kitty in my life since I can remember and for 4 years we did without, which was very difficult for me. Whether I'm reading in bed with our Molliwog rubbing her face against the pages of my book or having Winks purr like a madman when I stop by to feed him when Brian's folks are away... these cats just mean the world to me. 

3) The smell of a good campfire - I'll admit, I'm a sucker for certain smells and the scent of wood burning is one of them.  Good thing I married and Eagle Scout and I was a Cadet in Girl Scouts.  Between the two of us, if we need one, a good campfire is an easy undertaking.

4) The taste of freshly baked bread - To quote a co-worker of mine, "I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like," and since I'm home on vacation and have some spare time this week, I've been cooking a lot.  Today I made spice bread and it is just so good hot with a little pat of butter.  I love my bread machine; now I just have to remember how it works.

5) My hobbies - They might sound distinctly unimportant in the scheme of things, but knitting, paper crafting, photography, blogging and computer games really make a big difference in my life.  They de-stress me while forcing me to be creative and laugh at myself.  There is also the added bonus that they are all social in some way.  I play World of Warcraft with several of my friends, so that gives me a chance to spend some time with them during the week when I normally couldn't see them.  Almost all of my paper crafting projects happen when I'm in a class of mostly familiar faces and my knitting introduces me to all sorts of small businesses and other knitters as I look around for some beautiful new yarn I have yet to discover.

6) The exquisitely soft feel of Malabrigo - Ok, forgive me, I'm going to step into my yarn geek persona.  If you told me a year ago that I was going to absolutely drool over certain types of yarns... I would have thought you were crazy.  However, a tactile obsession has befallen me sometime since I started knitting in earnest.  I. Love. Soft. Yarn.  All I do when I go to a fiber store is touch things.  I can honestly say I have picked up a gorgeously dyed skein to put it in my basket, only to put it down when I notice it's just not soft enough for me to knit with.  So sad.... but, at this point I know my weakness.  To me the perfect illustration of what is soft (yarnwise) is how Malabrigo Worsted feels.

7) The generosity of others - It always blows me a away how generous people can be.  Just this week one of my friends' parents gave us a beautiful four poster queen sized bed.  They were moving and didn't need it so they generously said we could have it.  Now, my husband and I have been married for over six years now and for those six years have been sleeping in a full sized bed.  Our old bed was great, don't get me wrong, it was just a little tough to establish peace where covers were concerned....  Another example is how quickly Brian and I found ourselves with new queen sized sheet sets and a comforter after mentioning our new bed's imminent arrival.  I mean really, we didn't even have time to go out any buy any for ourselves!   

8) Music - I don't think I can say how much am am thankful for music and do it any kind of justice.  It has played such a large part in my life for so many years that I don't know how to begin.  I have yet to find a musical genre I don't like at least in some way.  From classically written movie scores to musicals and Metallica, I really enjoy a wide range as both a listener and performer.  Music is just the perfect way to express all kinds of emotions that are hard to convey by words alone.

9) All the beauty that surrounds me - Spring flowers, blazing sunsets and birds calling in the early hours of the morning; the sound of children playing on the playground outside our window.  These are just a few of those tiny things that bring a smile to my face everyday that people often overlook.  Even I forget to take time out for them on a busy day, but when I have a change to slow down and relax, they creep back into view.

10) My wonderful husband -  I couldn't leave him out now could I?  Love you honey!

Apples, apples everywhere....

...and not a bite to eat! Well, ok, I lied. There was tons to eat, including this amazing apple cider donut (my favorite of all time).

This past Saturday a group of our friends including 6 adults (in physical age only), a three year old and a very cute Redbone Coonhound met at Shelburne Farm in Acton, MA for our Annual Apple Day. Unfortunately, a few of our friends weren't able to be there with us due to things like living in other states and illness, but the spirit of Apple Day was present nonetheless. We just hope they can make it next year.

The day was one of those that seems like it's going to be freezing, yet somehow you end up warm. After looking at the llama, sheep and goats and grabbing a donut, we began our trek into the orchard.

It actually took us a little while to find some good apples because many of the trees were picked clean on the portion that we could reach without a ladder. The main reason for this was that the farm was keeping certain areas of the orchard closed off so other pickers would be able to find fruit later on in the season.

We were looking primarily for Macs and Cortlands, which have turned out to be great choices for both pie baking and applesauce making over the years. After a little bit of hunting, however we did find some nice examples of appley goodness within reach and even discovered that our mini-person (blame Brian for that name) could fit under all the trees and get to all the apples we couldn't reach without breaking the branches. Luke, you definitely earned your keep on Saturday! I swear he personally filled the last 1/2 a bag himself while the rest of us just watched.

Katie the Coonhound also helped out by keeping us apprised of all the other people around us, not to mention the other dogs who came out with their respective family members. Isn't she beautiful? I always get such great pictures of her when she finds her way into my viewfinder.

After returning to the farm stand for our well earned cider and ice cream we headed back to Erin & Joel's to begin phase II of Apple Day: The Apple Peeling/Coring/Dicing Extravaganza. This process used to take ages, especially back in the day when we first started the tradition. For many years grossly overestimated how many apples we needed to make pies for each of the households and applesauce as well. So, the prep process seemed endless... especially since we did all the work by hand, but over time we gradually got better and then this year we were spot on.

We ended up getting only one bushel, which turned out to be the perfect amount to provide for all the folks present this year. We also have made the process less tedious by investing in a few apple peeler, corer/slicers. Of the two we used, mine (of course) was made of failure. Tara's, however, worked like a charm and the three of us girls had all the apples set to go in an hour or two. Edit: Correction! Mine is no longer full of fail. The cutting blade was just was set out far enough. Now that the adjustment has been made, mine works perfectly! Ha! Ok, well, except for the handle that keeps falling off...

We still have to cut the peeled apples after they go through the machine, but really this is so easy, its almost not like work at all.

At the end of the day, we would up with four pies (thanks go to Heather's mom for the recipe), a nice sized cauldron full of yummy tart applesauce we split up and 9 cups of apple butter (a newcomer to our usual recipe list). Mmmmmm... apple butter... It turns out that apple butter is really just applesauce that has been pureed and made thicker by boiling it down. You can find the recipe we used here at Cooking Light.