I’ve snagged an invitation to have Christmas dinner with Maureen, and am using it as an excuse to make my first ever attempt at homemade candy. (After all, I’ve only eaten dozens and dozens of cookies…obviously what I need is more sugar!) Candy is tricky, but I think it went pretty well.
I made the candied orange peel yesterday:
It came out …
Sugar cookies are a holiday tradition in my family. I’ve frosted them many times, but I have never made them start to finish before. But I got the recipe from my mom, and decided to give it a go. I made a batch of dough and let it chill for a couple hours in the fridge.
These were nice easy drop cookies. I like the combination of the craisins and the white chocolate, and the oatmeal makes for a nice chewy cookie.
I tasted a couple of these this morning when they came out of the oven, just to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with them (can’t bring defective cookies to the cookie swap!). Because the cookies contain both oatmeal and fruit, they are part of a healthy breakfast…right?
When I was a kid, my mom baked cookies every Christmas. Not one batch of cookies, or two batches of cookies. My mom made double batches of several kinds of cookies which we arranged on red and green paper plates and took to all the neighbors. They were extremely popular — just yesterday a friend of mine dropped me a note saying that she was thinking about making the sugar cookies my mom always made at Christmas time (and we haven’t done the neighborhood cookie distribution for years). Everybody had a different favorite cookie — date/coconut balls, chocolate chip cookies …
I’ve currently got thirteen stories out at various markets. This is an all time high for me, so I’m pretty pleased. In case anybody is curious where the stories go, here’s a list of the markets I have stories at right now:
Abyss & Apex
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Coyote Wild
Fantasy & Science Fiction
Flash Fiction Online
Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD)
Hub
Interfictions II anthology
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
Les Bonnes Fees
Realms of Fantasy
Talebones
(This isn’t an all-inclusive list of markets I submit …
Yesterday it was over 70 degrees outside. It was toasty warm. I wore a tank top. Today, at 3:30 in the afternoon, it was 32 degrees. I went out to run some errands and practically froze to death. (I wore a sweatshirt; in retrospect I should probably have also worn a jacket.) The overnight low tonight is 27. Texas weather is weird.
(While I was out running errands, I dropped a story in the mail, which gets me up to twelve submissions out at market. This is the most subs I’ve ever had out at the same time, so I’m …
I snagged a recipe for cranberry-orange bread from tinaconnolly,* and decided to attempt it this morning, so that I can bring some to brunch tomorrow. I’d have made it tomorrow except that (1) I won’t have time tomorrow, and (2) this gives me time to come up with something else if for some reason the cranberry bread doesn’t come out.
So far, I have determined that it *smells* like delicious bread, and it *looks* like delicious bread. I am now waiting for …
I’ve managed to snag an invitation to have another Thanksgiving dinner with Maureen and her family, and she said I could bring a dessert*, so I decided I’d make cranberry-orange cheesecake**. It has a gingersnap-graham-cracker crust, and swirls of cranberry sauce flavored with orange zest. The swirls came out quite pretty. Sadly, the cheesecake cracked rather extensively. I consulted with tinaconnolly, who had made cheesecake before, and she assured me that cheesecakes crack all the time, and that it should still taste …
I roasted up some of the squash from yesterday’s photo session and made squash soup. There is a reason most squash soup recipes call for butternut squash. Winter squashes are all hard to hack up into manageable sized bits, but at least a butternut squash has a fair amount of edible flesh inside. Dumpling squashes, while cute and pretty, have a much higher work-to-flesh ratio. There’s hardly any squash in there at all once you get the seeds out! (The dumpling squash does taste …
For Halloween, my grocery store was selling little bags of decorative squash. After Halloween, the decorative squash went on sale (and with good reason — some of it had started to get moldy, which was disgusting). In addition to the (non-edible) decorative squash, I got a couple dumpling squashes and a carnival squash, which will hopefully become squash soup sometime in the near future. IMO, the edible squashes are prettier than the decorative ones (but the decorative ones do make nice filler).
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