Saturday, December 23, 2017

The Day Before the Day Before Christmas

   I spent the morning baking cookies for my Christmas dinner dessert tray. When my mom was alive and family and friends (18-20 of them!) came to our house for Christmas Eve dinner Mom would always have a tray of Italian Christmas cookies and a plate of honey clusters for dessert.  My ladies would all bring their special cookies and what a tray we would end up with! As time went on and the numbers went down we made fewer cookies each year until in the years just before she died we 'cheated' and just made 1 recipe, split it into thirds and added extra ingredients to end up with 3 different cookies. That's what I did this morning. I used an egg cookie recipe from an old 'church lady' cookbook and by adding chopped nuts and maraschino cherries to one third of the batter and chopped nuts and cocoa to another third I ended up with 3 different looking cookies. 
(I'll frost them later and arrange them on a Christmas plate.) I bought a package of pizella a couple of days ago but it disappeared overnight (explaining why I waited until today to bake)! I got another package yesterday but I hid it and will put them out at the last minute! Eventho I use Stevia instead of sugar I don't think Jeff should eat these cookies to his heart's content for a day or two. (He is Type II.) There will be only 4 of us for dinner on Christmas Day so there should be enough cookies to go around. (I'll make up a package of cookies for my cousin to take home, too.) And I promised Jeff a chocolate pie for dessert, too, but I'll use sugar-free pudding for that.  Tonight or tomorrow I'll make honey clusters.  I love them!  It was always a job cutting and frying the dough but now I don't mind.  I did just 1 recipe last year and made one cluster for us and a small one for my cousin Ed.  Think I'll do that again.  Jeff's pretty good about staying away from it...the honey really drives up his blood sugar!
  I've been a little upset because my sock yarn order got lost in the mail somewhere.  I've been tracking it online and it's been stuck in Stow, Ohio for 3 days!  Finally yesterday it started to move and now the USPS Tracking site says it's been delivered!  Jeff went to town a little while ago and picked up the mail on his way out.  Can't wait until he comes home with my sock yarn!  I wonder if I can get 1 sock done by Christmas?  I'm not even going to start Jeff's socks.  I'll do them the week between Christmas and New Years.  We'll see how fast I can knit!

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