It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like....November??

Hello, everyone!! Hope your holidays are going well... Ours have been going beautifully. This may be a lengthy update, but that's mostly because this is the first time that I've found a moment to update the blog in weeks...

Thanksgiving went wonderfully!! For being my first hosted major holiday, I don't think I did too badly. My future mother-in-law lent me her turkey roaster, which made things much easier by freeing up my oven for all the other cooking we did. Everything turned out deliciously!! It was so nice to have my mom, brother and grandparents here! Mom and Grandma were super helpful to me. I made it through the entire holiday and only cried once. Given that I'm the girl that cries at pretty much everything, I think that's a huge success. I would love to post pictures of the food we made and of the family, but I managed to lose my phone while grocery shopping a couple of weeks ago (go me!) and I lost all of my pictures.

The thing that seems to be on everyone's mind is snow. We haven't had any this year, which is very unusual for this area!! Normally, Boise gets about 1.55" of precipitation in December. So far, we've had zip! Nada! Nothing!! Needless to say, being the avid snowmobiler that J is, he's more than a little disappointed. By now, I've completely given up hope for a 'white Christmas'. I may be the only one who feels this way, but Christmas just doesn't feel the same without snow... However, our Christmas decorations are cheering me up and keeping me in the festive mood. We ran icicle lights around the gutters of our home - and when I say "we", I mean that J did it while I stood on the yard under him and passed up the strings of lights. We managed to pick the windiest day of winter to do this, and were chilled to the bone by the time we finished. J bought me a string of little snowmen that are on stakes for our yard. They light up and are completely precious. We bought a new Christmas tree this year! It's 7.5', pre-lit with multi-colored lights and already has a random spattering of family Christmas ornaments, ornaments we bought this year and red and gold balls in matte and glitter. It's definitely festive. I've been working steadily on my homemade Christmas presents and baking, and things have been coming along beautifully. I started out with chocolate holiday bark in three varieties, thanks largely to my mom. When she was here for Thanksgiving, we took some mom-daughter time to go shopping and make some sweet treats. She came up with the idea for and helped my set up my Christmas centerpiece - a small Christmas tree, pre-lit with clear lights and red and sliver ornaments. She also helped me pick more Christmas lawn ornaments - large plastic, swirly candy canes!! So adorable!! She also taught me to make bark and all I can do is wish that I'd known how to make it sooner!! So simple! We made white chocolate with cran-cherries, dark chocolate with cran-cherries and chopped almonds and peppermint bark. Sooo yummy!! I decided these barks (is that the right way to say that??) would be perfect in the boxes of Christmas treats I make for friends each year. In addition to this candy, I made two types of cookies and another candy... The first cookie I made was candy-cane sugar cookies. Basically a simple sugar cookie with a 1/2 cup of crushed candy cane mixed in, pressed with fork tines as you would with peanut butter cookies... Here's before and after baking photos:

 Recipe courtesy of RecipeGirl

They are very yummy and light. The interesting thing with these, which I could have anticipated if I'd thought of it, was what would happen to the bigger bits of candy cane after spending 10 minutes in a 375 degree oven... It came out in the consistency of taffy and rapidly hardened. It didn't make a difference in the end to the quality of cookies, but I ended up having to break strings of candy cane-flavored strings off of the cookies from when I transferred them from the baking sheet to the cooling rack. The second variety of cookies I baked for the boxes was a basic chocolate spritz drizzled with white chocolate. I love spritz cookies, regardless of the time of the year!! Last year I treated myself to a cookie press and I was instantly in love. It's a fun and easy way to get cookies into interesting shapes that you wouldn't be able to achieve otherwise. Spritz cookies are, as I like to describe them, dumbed-down sugar cookies. They're not as sweet as sugar cookies, but the recipe is very basic, made with things that you have normally in your pantry. In fact, I wasn't planning on these cookies until I realized that I needed a little something else in the boxes and realized I had the stuff in the pantry for them... They turned out beautifully and taste like Oreos!! I'll definitely be making these again...very festive!! I've officially dubbed them "zebra cookies". You can see why...

For my second type of candy, I opted for an easy one that my family usually makes around Christmas... cinnamon Santas' dipped in white chocolate. I added sprinkles of red sugar for fun. I found both the white chocolate and the candies in the bulk section at my local grocery store, which saved me a ton. They always turn out so adorable... :)

As you can see, it's not hard to make a LOT of these little guys... A good go-to Christmas candy for gifts, that's for sure.

My next cooking project that I took on was more on the savory side. I love keeping easy breakfast items around the house, and in the winter time cereal doesn't always cut it. I much prefer a warm breakfast (specifically the kind that doesn't require dirtying dishes). Normally I make breakfast sandwiches using english muffins, eggs, cheese and sausage, but I was getting a little bored with it. I remembered that my mom and grandma used to make breakfast burritos for my dad, grandpa and the rest of the family for our family trips to the cabin for hunting in the winter time. Everyone always loved them and they seemed so easy!! I used 1 pound of ground breakfast sausage, one yellow onion, one green bell pepper, 12 eggs, 1/2 cup of milk, 2 lbs of Golden Yukon potatoes, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, spices and seasoned salt, about 2 cups of cheddar cheese and 22 burrito-sized flour tortillas. I combined the eggs and milk in a shallow pan, cooking until the eggs were scrambled. In the meantime, I diced the potatoes into 1"x1" cubes and tossed with the oil, spices and salt. Then I browned the sausage, adding the onion and green pepper when it was almost done. While that was cooking, I roasted the potatoes in an aluminum-lined cookie sheet at 450 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring once during cooking. When that the cooking was done, I put a little of the sausage mixture, eggs, potatoes and cheese in each tortilla and folded it like a burrito. Here's a picture of all of my yummy ingredients (minus the cheese and tortillas):

Once all of the burritos were wrapped up, I wrapped them in plastic wrap and then wrapped them again in Press-and-Seal (which is amazing, if you've never used it), and then threw them all in the freezer! Just 1 minute and 45 seconds in the microwave in the morning gives me a warm breakfast that I can eat on the way to work! I even had ingredients leftover to make a couple that were vegetarian! They were just as delicious as the ones that have meat, which is a nice option to have if you're like me and dabble in vegetarian meals now and again. This recipe is so versatile!! You could add all kinds of veggies, or play with different kinds of meats. It would be great with spicy sausage or bacon! However, BE WARNED: this recipe makes a lot of food! 22 burritos may not seem like a huge amount, but the burritos are actually good-sized. This was also very cost-effective! I would definitely encourage you to try it... I know I'll be doing it again for sure!

That brings us basically up to last week! I would love to post pictures of the Christmas gifts I've been making, but I don't want to spoil any surprises for anyone! I'll be posting more pictures after Christmas. Last week/this weekend has been an awesome intro for Christmas... I spend Wednesday night volunteering at Winter Garden-a-Glow for the Idaho Botanical Gardens here in Boise. I was working in a kiosk selling admission tickets to visitors and had a fabulous time seeing so many people come out to enjoy a beautiful place in our community! There were so many little kids coming to the gardens that night, and it was so fun to see them so excited, huddling with their parents in the cold and racing towards the beautiful light displays. Take a look at what the gardens have offer this year by clicking HERE. Simply beautiful. J, his mom, his step-dad, his brother and I will be visiting the gardens this Thursday and I'm so excited to see all of the LED light installations that are new this year! Thursday night we headed over to J's mom's house to help her assemble cookie trays that she gives out to her friends. I've never seen anyone own Christmas like she does! She makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 varieties of Christmas cookies each year, which explains why she asked us to help her put them all into trays. It was a great time just laughing and spending time in the kitchen. I always enjoy spending time with his family. Friday night we headed to the home of a long-time friend of mine to celebrate her graduation from Boise State University!! I'm so proud of her so it was nice to gather with her other friends and family and congratulate her on this huge achievement. Saturday night we headed back to J's mom's house for her Christmas party. About 80 people stopped by as we ate off of her huge buffet of appetizers and cookies, sipped our wine and cocktails and signed up for the door prizes she had waiting under the enormous Christmas tree. It was a really great time! And finally, today, J and I took the time to relax together. We slept in and then napped on the couches in front of the TV before he had to head off to work. As he got ready for work, I whipped him up some yummy stuff to take to work with him. Firstly, I made Chocolate cupcakes with Peppermint frosting. I had found this Pillsbury frosting at the grocery store last week (it was the last container of it!) and I simply couldn't leave without it. I already had a boxed milk chocolate cake mix in my pantry that I was trying to get rid of, as well as a half-empty box of candy canes... That resulted in these little babies:

I got about 20 cupcakes out of the batch. I topped them with the white, peppermint-flavored icing. The icing tasted differently than I was expecting. It's more of a vanilla-with-a-hint-of-peppermint than outright peppermint. I finely crushed the candy canes by putting them in a Ziploc sandwich bag, putting the bag between two pieces of aluminum foil and using my wooden rolling pin to smash them to bits!! It was pretty fun. :) Next I added about a tablespoon of red sugar to the crushed candy canes and sprinkled this mixture over the frosted cupcakes. They were delicious! The peppermint is definitely the commanding flavor in these - the chocolate is more of an afterthought. For dinner, I whipped up my mom's amazing oven-fried chicken, as well as some mashed potatoes, brown gravy (my favorite!) and buttermilk biscuits!! Needless to say, it's been a great day for cooking! Hopefully my culinary luck will continue through the end of the holidays!

That's all the updating I have time for now, but I hope you all have a very beautiful Christmas and a joyful New Years!!