I'll open this post with baking since I mentioned it in the last one. I've recently made two recipes out of the Beekman Boys Heritage Dessert cookbook. I like the oatmeal cream sandwich cookie recipe better, but only have a picture of the peanut butter sandwich cookie.
Way too tall to eat. Andrew also made a peanut butter sandwich cookie from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook but the were way more involved to make than these guys. We like the cream better from the Bouchon but the cookie better from Beekman.
And the weekend before Christmas, in between seeing the new Star Wars movie and our annual outing to the Nutcracker, was spent making gingerbread and butter roll out cookies Last year I helped Mom, and was supposed to take on the torch. I promised myself that I would practice all year and it just got away from me as things do. I was freaking out a little bit, like someone who hadn't studied and now final exams were here.
Andrew, who is much less intimidated by rolling out dough and does the pie backing, started a batch of butter cookies. This old recipe, delicious and not to sweet is tricky at the best of times. Having to substitute the butter flavored Crisco for lactose intolerance make the dough even more temperamental because of the difference in fat content.
Andrew braved the wilds of butter cookie making so I felt like at least one batch was made and I had the space to ruin a batch.
But, mine turned out too.
They were a little too thick, but serviceable and tasted "just like Mom's."
I had ordered a custom cookie cutter to make little Tutus...but it is way too big and were almost impossible to cut out much less ice.
I think I may repurpose it as a Christmas ornament. I also made gingerbread boys, but even the gingerbread boy cutter stuck relentlessly to the dough so I gave up and made lots of candy canes, which I then dubbed "ginger Js" because a candy cane upside down looks like a J and this seemed completely rational to me at the time...
But lo, what have we here?
Real, honest to God cow's milk butter without the lactose. God Bless these people at Green Valley who also do cream cheese, cottage cheese, Greek and regular yogurt, and sour cream. Butter was knocked off production for a while and I'm still hoping it will turn up in Columbus. A recent trip to Jungle Jim's though paid off. I'm making it a goal to try the butter cookies again in January with real butter!
Aside from butter cookies with thick powdered sugar based icing another holiday tradition is the candy keg started by Grandma Perdue decades ago. I though I would give it a little spotlight here.
Grandma Perdue used to save an empty oatmeal cannister for each of her five sons and wrap them in Christmas wrapping paper. She would then buy enough candy to fill all of them with a shared base of candy but then also buy each boy one or two of their special favorites and mix them into the "candy keg."
I can't imagine what it must have been like to raise 5 boys born over the span of 12 years but I hear that Grandma really came down on any ideas of pilfering a brother's keg. Apparently if you were caught with a keg that was not your own...you lost your own keg to that brother!
This was a tradition Grandma kept up even when her boys were grown, including shipping kegs out of state.
In the early 2000's as Grandma got older, my Mom took over for my Dad and my Uncle and then for Andrew when he joined the family.
Here is Andrew's.
His is pretty simple as I just use three of his favorite kinds of candy. I would tell you what's in it, but the contents as well as the keg itself are in an undisclosed location for everyone's safety.
In early December Andrew and I went to the Winterfair arts and crafts fair like we do every year. We've added the Columbus College of Art and Design fair to the list and this time we ate breakfast in Grandview Heights at a place called Marshall's. The food was fine, but I was more intrigued by their indoor koi tank that featured, I don't know what you call it a water bridge?
This water filled plexiglass tunnel allowed fish to migrate from one side of the wall to another. Andrew tried to explain to me how it works, but I'm a children's library manager, not an engineer. Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool.
And now a word from our pets:
Maxwell has recently celebrated his 10 year anniversary with us, as we brought him home on December 30, 2009 as a companion for Molly after her, and our, beloved Tweeker died in October of that year.
Maxwell, our least affectionate cat, has the dubious distinction of being our most long lived one as he will turn 12 sometime in 2020.
Maxwell doesn't look a hair different from ten years ago, although we do have to clean his teeth every year as by the time a year rolls by his teeth look like the worst in the line up on the dental poster at the vet's office. It's worth it though because it's less expensive to clean teeth than it is to pull them out in ones and twos and threes over time. It also contributes to the pet's health and better aging.
One notable thing about Maxwell is he is hands down the most gentle (and perhaps shy and perhaps depressed) cat you will ever meet. Who are we kidding, you will never meet him. He hides most of the time now that we have a dog in the house. When he does share a few minutes of quality time though, he loves pets even on his tummy, and he never swats or nips at you like most cats when they have had enough. He simply gets up and walks away. He has never lashed out once no matter how much he's groomed or petted. He just walks away.
Maxwell is also known for his meow, which is simply a plaintive "ow" as no one has told him there is a "me" in front of it. He spends most of his time in the guest bedroom.
Here is a rare moment of him spending quality time in the bedroom as the dog and Andrew are downstairs.
Sadly, Maxwell has not gelled with Moxie, even after Molly's death. They seem to be a pair mostly around feeding time and even when they share the guest bedroom they are not super close on the bed.
Moxie is two years younger than Maxwell and has been with us for 6 years. She was the rainbows and butterflies cute cat at PetSmart that we could not resist. She is our darter and we have to be very careful as she has gotten out about 4 or 5 times. Each time we've been able to grab her...usually while she is stopping to smell something.
It is not safe for her to be out. There is much more traffic on this road than the days of Chubby, my childhood cat. Plus there are more foxes and coyotes than ever. Unlike Maxwell who has gleefully left his stray days behind. Moxie seems convinced there is nothing but adventure and fun waiting for her outside.
Moxie will totally bite you if over stimulated and give gentle love nips as she loves to lick our chins, cheeks and nose. Unlike Maxwell she does enjoy being picked up and held if not really a lap cat.
Moxie's interests include trying to eat the houseplants, throwing up a hair ball every 72 hours, swatting at the puppy, and laying on paper and/or cardboard.
Moxie doesn't meow or chirp a whole lot and her only health issue was the removal of 4 bladder stones in the fall of 2016 (within 10 days of Molly's last surgery) luckily for us it's been the kind of stone that can be prevented with special (read expensive) food.
She also enjoys laying on my yoga mat.
This leaves the chickens, which I will blog about later. For now though I will tell you this is the first time in the almost 10 years I've had chickens that I have hens that are going to lay all winter.
These fluffy, cream and orange, beautiful and biddable Golden Comets were born in the spring and just started laying in late September and they are going to lay all winter.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this is an unexpected gift and burden. I have to collect the eggs every two or three days lest they be stepped on or freeze and expand then thaw (thus drawing curiosity and increasing the odds the chickens discover their eggs can also be snacks) but also I have to refill their electric waterer that holds three gallons every three days because it takes water to make eggs.
So far the mild weather has made this doable. I do need to clean their chicken coop soon though. Once I get past this cold I have, the second in 60 days.
Tutu, our first dog of the house, also deserves her own blog post, which I will do once I can choose the pictures. There are a lot.
Way too tall to eat. Andrew also made a peanut butter sandwich cookie from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook but the were way more involved to make than these guys. We like the cream better from the Bouchon but the cookie better from Beekman.
And the weekend before Christmas, in between seeing the new Star Wars movie and our annual outing to the Nutcracker, was spent making gingerbread and butter roll out cookies Last year I helped Mom, and was supposed to take on the torch. I promised myself that I would practice all year and it just got away from me as things do. I was freaking out a little bit, like someone who hadn't studied and now final exams were here.
Andrew, who is much less intimidated by rolling out dough and does the pie backing, started a batch of butter cookies. This old recipe, delicious and not to sweet is tricky at the best of times. Having to substitute the butter flavored Crisco for lactose intolerance make the dough even more temperamental because of the difference in fat content.
Andrew braved the wilds of butter cookie making so I felt like at least one batch was made and I had the space to ruin a batch.
But, mine turned out too.
They were a little too thick, but serviceable and tasted "just like Mom's."
I had ordered a custom cookie cutter to make little Tutus...but it is way too big and were almost impossible to cut out much less ice.
I think I may repurpose it as a Christmas ornament. I also made gingerbread boys, but even the gingerbread boy cutter stuck relentlessly to the dough so I gave up and made lots of candy canes, which I then dubbed "ginger Js" because a candy cane upside down looks like a J and this seemed completely rational to me at the time...
But lo, what have we here?
Real, honest to God cow's milk butter without the lactose. God Bless these people at Green Valley who also do cream cheese, cottage cheese, Greek and regular yogurt, and sour cream. Butter was knocked off production for a while and I'm still hoping it will turn up in Columbus. A recent trip to Jungle Jim's though paid off. I'm making it a goal to try the butter cookies again in January with real butter!
Aside from butter cookies with thick powdered sugar based icing another holiday tradition is the candy keg started by Grandma Perdue decades ago. I though I would give it a little spotlight here.
Grandma Perdue used to save an empty oatmeal cannister for each of her five sons and wrap them in Christmas wrapping paper. She would then buy enough candy to fill all of them with a shared base of candy but then also buy each boy one or two of their special favorites and mix them into the "candy keg."
I can't imagine what it must have been like to raise 5 boys born over the span of 12 years but I hear that Grandma really came down on any ideas of pilfering a brother's keg. Apparently if you were caught with a keg that was not your own...you lost your own keg to that brother!
This was a tradition Grandma kept up even when her boys were grown, including shipping kegs out of state.
In the early 2000's as Grandma got older, my Mom took over for my Dad and my Uncle and then for Andrew when he joined the family.
Here is Andrew's.
His is pretty simple as I just use three of his favorite kinds of candy. I would tell you what's in it, but the contents as well as the keg itself are in an undisclosed location for everyone's safety.
In early December Andrew and I went to the Winterfair arts and crafts fair like we do every year. We've added the Columbus College of Art and Design fair to the list and this time we ate breakfast in Grandview Heights at a place called Marshall's. The food was fine, but I was more intrigued by their indoor koi tank that featured, I don't know what you call it a water bridge?
This water filled plexiglass tunnel allowed fish to migrate from one side of the wall to another. Andrew tried to explain to me how it works, but I'm a children's library manager, not an engineer. Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool.
And now a word from our pets:
Maxwell has recently celebrated his 10 year anniversary with us, as we brought him home on December 30, 2009 as a companion for Molly after her, and our, beloved Tweeker died in October of that year.
Maxwell, our least affectionate cat, has the dubious distinction of being our most long lived one as he will turn 12 sometime in 2020.
Maxwell doesn't look a hair different from ten years ago, although we do have to clean his teeth every year as by the time a year rolls by his teeth look like the worst in the line up on the dental poster at the vet's office. It's worth it though because it's less expensive to clean teeth than it is to pull them out in ones and twos and threes over time. It also contributes to the pet's health and better aging.
One notable thing about Maxwell is he is hands down the most gentle (and perhaps shy and perhaps depressed) cat you will ever meet. Who are we kidding, you will never meet him. He hides most of the time now that we have a dog in the house. When he does share a few minutes of quality time though, he loves pets even on his tummy, and he never swats or nips at you like most cats when they have had enough. He simply gets up and walks away. He has never lashed out once no matter how much he's groomed or petted. He just walks away.
Maxwell is also known for his meow, which is simply a plaintive "ow" as no one has told him there is a "me" in front of it. He spends most of his time in the guest bedroom.
Here is a rare moment of him spending quality time in the bedroom as the dog and Andrew are downstairs.
Sadly, Maxwell has not gelled with Moxie, even after Molly's death. They seem to be a pair mostly around feeding time and even when they share the guest bedroom they are not super close on the bed.
Moxie is two years younger than Maxwell and has been with us for 6 years. She was the rainbows and butterflies cute cat at PetSmart that we could not resist. She is our darter and we have to be very careful as she has gotten out about 4 or 5 times. Each time we've been able to grab her...usually while she is stopping to smell something.
It is not safe for her to be out. There is much more traffic on this road than the days of Chubby, my childhood cat. Plus there are more foxes and coyotes than ever. Unlike Maxwell who has gleefully left his stray days behind. Moxie seems convinced there is nothing but adventure and fun waiting for her outside.
Moxie will totally bite you if over stimulated and give gentle love nips as she loves to lick our chins, cheeks and nose. Unlike Maxwell she does enjoy being picked up and held if not really a lap cat.
Moxie's interests include trying to eat the houseplants, throwing up a hair ball every 72 hours, swatting at the puppy, and laying on paper and/or cardboard.
Moxie doesn't meow or chirp a whole lot and her only health issue was the removal of 4 bladder stones in the fall of 2016 (within 10 days of Molly's last surgery) luckily for us it's been the kind of stone that can be prevented with special (read expensive) food.
She also enjoys laying on my yoga mat.
This leaves the chickens, which I will blog about later. For now though I will tell you this is the first time in the almost 10 years I've had chickens that I have hens that are going to lay all winter.
These fluffy, cream and orange, beautiful and biddable Golden Comets were born in the spring and just started laying in late September and they are going to lay all winter.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this is an unexpected gift and burden. I have to collect the eggs every two or three days lest they be stepped on or freeze and expand then thaw (thus drawing curiosity and increasing the odds the chickens discover their eggs can also be snacks) but also I have to refill their electric waterer that holds three gallons every three days because it takes water to make eggs.
So far the mild weather has made this doable. I do need to clean their chicken coop soon though. Once I get past this cold I have, the second in 60 days.
Tutu, our first dog of the house, also deserves her own blog post, which I will do once I can choose the pictures. There are a lot.
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