Our traditional grand breakfast

 

Again this year, we had four of our local grandchildren over to carry on a tradition we've been tweaking for many years -- I would say at least a dozen years.  It used to be breakfast (or supper, once or twice) out, then Christmas shopping for their parents, followed by ice cream sundaes at Kellerhaus.

It has evolved over the years and most often began with breakfast out at McDonalds or a diner.  But ever since 2020, we have found it works much better to skip eating out and also to skip shopping (as three of them have jobs and can surely buy their own gifts).  Instead, after breakfast, we have a time of crafting, candy making, or both (and sometimes a spot of tree decorating).  I thought today I would share about this year's breakfast.

As usual, I kept breakfast simple but hearty with breakfast sliders 

 

and a Hash Brown Casserole.  The hash brown casserole is always a big favorite with this crowd. 

I also made the Cinnamon Fried Apples recipe you see at the top of the post.  I change that up a little in that I substitute 1/4 cup pure maple syrup for the sugars that are called for.  I also slice the apples rather than chop them.

I had planned on making this coffeecake to fill in any gaps.  I had made this in a previous year and the kids enjoyed it.  But even though it is super easy and fast, I ran out of time.  I had squares of pumpkin coffeecake, blueberry coffeecake,  and cranberry breakfast cake in the freezer, so I warmed those up instead.  

And that was this year's grand breakfast!  The company was even better than the food.

Friday five, Christmasy doings edition

 

Christmas 1952

Here's a quick Friday five, listing more Christmasy doings from the past week:

🎄 1. Last Saturday we found a conducive time for our Christmas tradition with four local grandkids.  We enjoyed a wonderful homemade breakfast, lots of Christmas crafting time with Grammy's crafting stash, a bit of candy making, and then a trip to Kellerhaus for ice cream sundaes.  I'll write an entire post about this on one blog or the other, but here are a couple of photos.

 

Grampa and Ari study the Rolo bag to check the candy recipe. 

The above was my sundae.  About all you can see is whipped cream, salted peanuts, and banana chips, but there was homemade vanilla ice cream under there, along with hot fudge, hot butterscotch, and warm peanut butter sauces.

🎄 2.  Our church kids and teens put on a Christmas musical play.  It was well attended and greatly enjoyed.  Below are four of our grands who took part: the older three singing and the youngest one who had an acting/singing role in the drama.

🎄 3.  My hubby helping out with lots of baking.  You can see some of the fruits of his labor below on the Christmas dessert table at our daughter's home.

🎄 4. Finding time to bake, cook, and deliver goodies to friends in this lovely season of giving.

🎄 5.  A wonderful Christmas afternoon with our daughter, her hubby and family.

 

 

There you have it!  Friday five with a Christmasy vibe!

December happenings so far

 It's only December 9, and lots of holly-jolly happenings have already transpired around here, with many more still in the plans.

Let's see.  I really should go back to November 30, when we met friends for breakfast at Polly's Pancake Parlor.    I'm sort of counting that as December, since Polly's was already decorated for Christmas, and we've never been there in this season before.  The outdoor decorations were fun.  I didn't get photos of the food, but that was fantastic.

After leaving Polly's, we followed our friends to their home in Vermont, where we went for a nice winter walk.  The scene below is from our friends' back yard.  I took this as I stood on their back deck.

 

We were able to park on the road that leads to this farm.  It's a nice walking route, with just enough ups and downs to make it interesting and not over challenging. 

Here is the barn up close.  It was built in 1944 and is named Hillside Farm.

December 1 we met up with different friends at The Bacon Barn for breakfast.  This diner was new to us and also to our friends.  We ordinarily would not have planned back-to-back breakfast outings, but this one had been planned for weeks, working around the schedules of several people, while the Polly's meet-up was relatively spontaneous.  The food at The Bacon Barn was delicious and we would eat there again, but it was unfortunate we had just been to Polly's the day before.  The quality difference was observable.

Also on December 1 was a lovely gathering of our church ladies' group.  One of the ladies hosted in her beautiful dining room complete with crackling fireplace.  We enjoyed a wonderful lasagna meal, had a Christmas devotional time, and exchanged gifts and cookies.  The tray below was part of the gift I received, laden with Christmasy treats and snacks.  My friend knew we are trying to downsize, so chose a consumable gift for the most part.  I love this tray, though!

December 2 was a Christmas party with my hubby's former work crew.  He brought a cookie tray just like this one:

December 3, in addition to church, we enjoyed a lovely community Christmas concert at the historical society in a nearby town.  The weather was not the best -- raining and snowing -- but it was doable and we were so glad we did.  Our granddaughter is part of a youth orchestra that played several numbers, and there were other musical groups as well in addition to singing Christmas carols as a group.

 Let's see, on December 4th through the 7th we did a lot of Christmas preparations, especially baking.  My hubby has baked steadily for a week.  I also did some decorating.  On the 7th we set up the tree and got the lights in place.

On December 8 we had a fun plan with four of our grandkids for breakfast, cooked and served here.  After breakfast the plan was to maybe do a little candy making, a little crafting, a little tree decorating, before going out for make-your-own ice cream sundaes.   Grandson Sam helped Mr. T get the ornament boxes out of the attic and also did a bit of decorating with us before he jumped into crafting with the others.  

I didn't have specific crafts for them to do, but simply dragged out several boxes of Christmas craft materials.  The creativity that went on was simply astounding.  I didn't get photos of their creations, but there was everything from an amazing yarn-covered tree made from a paper roll to a tiny chest of drawers with little brass handles, made from three teensy matchboxes and brass wire.  And many, many other fun and beautiful ornaments.  It looked as if a craft store had exploded.  But so did the creativity!

Oh wait -- I did get a photo of a couple ornaments -- I had bought these at Walmart intending to trim a Christmas gift basket with one of them.  And I did.  Two said "Merry Christmas" and the others were intended to say "Holly Jolly".  Instead, they read "Holy Jolly."  I thought Josiah could probably transform them, as indeed he did.  They are the ones with beads on the hangers.  Check out the details on the one below left!

 And then I took a photo of the one and only ornament I made, one I've been wanting to make for years.

No candy making ever did get done, and we didn't leave for ice cream until 4 pm.  So lots of snacking on breakfast leftovers, crackers and cheese, and Christmas cookies, took place during the crafting time.

At top you see Ari with her ice cream sundae, and also Grampa's and mine.  The one below belongs to Miss Julia.

What a fun day it was!

And that brings us up to date on December so far! 

Making a Christmas recipe book, part 2

 

 I promised to share a couple more ideas for making a special notebook or recipe book just for Christmas recipes.  It really is a great project to work on right after Christmas, when the recipes you used are fresh in your mind and probably still right at hand.  

 However, you could work on this project any time of year, as the spirit moves.  It might be fun to work on during July, for Christmas in July, or anytime in summer to help you feel a little cooler.  Not only is such a cookbook a great way to keep your Christmas recipes accessible; these things would make absolutely wonderful gifts as well, for grown children or for grandchildren.  (I did post about this project a few years ago over on my Christmas blog, so if it looks familiar to someone, that would be why.)

Making a photo book from Shutterfly turned out to be the perfect way to get all of our favorite Christmas cookie recipes in one easy place.  We make a lot of cookies every year, but we do tend to use the same recipes each Christmas, possibly adding in a few new ones.  

The standard 8x8 photo books have 20 pages, so I used 18 of them as recipe pages with a different cookie recipe on each page.  Some of the recipes are from my childhood; others are as new as Christmas 2018. 

On the first page I wrote out some of my Christmas baking memories from childhood.  I actually had written these out years ago for a Christmas memory book, so I just copied and pasted it into a text box on a page in the Shutterfly book.

Then I chose the 18 recipes that I wanted to use and dived into making the recipe pages.  I had photos for most of the cookie varieties.  Shutterfly absolutely walks you through the process of putting photo book pages together.  The recipe book format was a little different than an ordinary photo book because there were so many large text boxes to fill with recipes.  I added in a few of the charming Shutterfly "stickers" to embellish each page.  I didn't overdo it with these pretty touches (though one certainly could be tempted to do so) but just added enough to add color and charm to each page.

The screenshots of some of my pages, below, give you an idea as to what can be done.

 

Every time I get a free photo book offer, I'll make up another of these cookie books.  In that way I just pay shipping. To my mind, $7.99 is a fair price indeed for such a nice and useful product.  I've been able to give many of these as gifts.

Hope this has inspired someone to make a recipe photo book!  If you want more details as to how I did it, let me know and I'll try to help.

Tweaking my traditional Christmas Eve Soup

 

 For decades, I have made the same soup for Christmas Eve; just a simple creamy potato soup with some carrots and celery included, and with crumbled bacon and shredded Cheddar cheese to sprinkle on top.  We used to always serve it with biscuit, rolls, corn muffins or some other type of bread.  In more recent years we have often served it with pizza.  You can find the recipe here: Christmas Eve Soup.

This year I am going to tweak it just a bit.  A month or so ago, I tried a recipe from a Gooseberry Patch cookbook, Sunday Dinner at Grandma's.  This happens to be a cookbook which I received for free in exchange for having a recipe published in it.   You can also find it here at  Gooseberry Patch.  (Interestingly, it was a soup recipe that I had published in this book -- Cream of Broccoli Soup!)

The recipe I tried recently, though, is Grandma Jo's Potato Soup.  Interestingly, the ingredients are almost exactly the same as our Christmas Eve Soup.  But this soup was much tastier!  What is the difference?  I've scanned the page from the cookbook to show you.

 My usual recipe calls for light cream; this one calls for evaporated milk.  The only other difference is that this calls for "onion and garlic seasoned salt".  I didn't have any of that, but I did have a container of garlic pepper seasoned salt, so I liberally added that to taste.    This added zesty seasoning, plus the creaminess from the evaporated milk, has to make the difference.

So this Christmas Eve, I'll be serving Grandma Jo's Potato Soup instead of my usual!

* The illustration at top is a scan of one of my very favorite Christmas cards, which features the Fred Swan painting Walking to Town.  To me it just says "Christmas Eve".  I actually have a cross-stitch kit of this design.  Maybe this year I will actually get to it! *

The tradition continues to evolve ...

 

Yes, the tradition we began with three, now four, of our local grands, continues to evolve.  As some regular readers may remember, we've done all sorts of things on the special day we set aside for Christmas fun with them.  It has usually included breakfast out, either at McDonalds or a diner.  Most years it's included taking them Christmas shopping, and going for the ice cream sundae bar at Kellerhaus.  Sometimes we've taken them over to Mill Falls to see the waterfall, which is often frozen around the edges this time of year and is lighted at night.

Last year, readers may recall, we had to tweak this tradition in a major way because of the prevailing paranoia and overreach.  This year we changed it up even more.

I did the breakfast all at home (and I should have looked up my post from last year so we could make that coffee cake! I'd forgotten that we had that.).  I'll write about this in a separate post and share recipes.  But briefly, we had homemade breakfast sandwiches, hash brown casserole (a perennial favorite with most). and cinnamon fried apples.

Instead of shopping this year, we tried something completely different and planned a time of candy making and simple crafting.  When I mentioned to their mom that the kids were going to be horrified that our Christmas tree wasn't up, she suggested we enlist their help.  So Mr. T put the tree up the light before, and the boys added the lights in the morning.  Mr. T also produced a surprise "snacking plate" of Christmas cookies for the kids to nibble on as we decorated, crafted, and made candy.  We also kept the leftover sandwiches warm for snacking purposes.

 
We made four kinds of candy -- chocolate dipped orange slices, rocky road fudge, candy cane fudge, and creamsicle fudge.  The orange slices are always a favorite, but the top favorite fudge was probably the rocky road.  The candy cane fudge turned out sticky, the creamsicle was declared "too sweet" and we didn't have the proper food coloring to turn it orange.  (I've already made a plan for what candies to make next year!

Sam with the first layer of candy cane fudge

Ari mixes peanuts and marshmallows into the rocky road fudge

Julia preparing to spread the rocky road in a pan.  Ari is licking the chocolate saucepan.

Josiah measuring sugar for creamsicle fudge as Sam offers moral support

Rocky road being spread in the pan by Julia

Oops, we had to turn the creamsicle fudge green and call it lime

Creamsicle fudge going into the pan; the white part will be swirled into it

 
I didn't get a photo of the orange slices being made (Julia did that) but here's what they look like:

Such an easy candy, and so delicious!

 
For a simple craft, I chose to use an idea that's been simmering around in my brain for awhile.  It was easy and uncomplicated, but with enough options that the kids could get as creative as they liked.  And they sure did!  I will hope to get them to scan their creations -- I forgot to get pictures -- so I can show you what they did.  I'll probably write about this project on my Christmas blog.

Around 1 pm, we headed out for Kellerhaus and ice cream.  Such a fun spot, we were so happy we could visit again this year.  I failed to get many photos, sadly.  We forgot the camera so had to use my Kindle.

Spoons poised and ready!

There's a corner chalkboard to add your name to if you like.  Ari and Julia (not shown) both added a message.

We then returned home to cut and package the fudge while the kids finished up their projects, then took them home, singing some familiar Christmas tunes and carols en route.  It was another wonderful time with these four grands!

Christmas baking update as of December 10

 

So we're 1/3 of the way into December.  It's been a busy month so far for Mr. T,  helping others with carpentry projects.  But every spare moment has found him in the kitchen, baking up a floury storm.  Here's a list of his progress so far:

2 double batches Chocolate Spritz

 
A double batch Peanut Blossoms

A double batch Whipped Shortbread

 

A double batch of Sacher Torte Cookies 

A triple batch of Eggnog Logs

 

A double batch of Secret Spice Cookies (the ones with red and green sugar on racks below)

 

A double batch of Chocolate Mint Crisps

A double batch of Christmas Tree Spritz

4 batches Heavenly Delight fudge

And I think that may be all, so far.  There are still a few varieties left on my tentative cookie list.  We're hoping to do some candy making with some of the grandkids, maybe tomorrow.