Days of Christmas: Holy Cannoli!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone! I hope 2011 brings you many blessings and much joy.

Between cooking dinner with my mother in law and running out to take pictures of the last sunset for the year, I have spent the afternoon learning to make cannoli from the recipe my mother in law's Aunt Mary gave her.  Aunt Mary was from Sicily, and quite the chef. When my in law's had moved into their first house, Aunt Mary came for a 5 day visit and went through 25 pounds of flour making pizza crusts, pasta and gnocchi to fill up their chest freezer.

Days of Christmas: Christmas Dinner

So, this will be a shockingly picture free post...for now. My big Christmas present from my husband this year was a Canon 10D digital SLR camera. The body is an older one, but the kit that came was way worth the price he was able to get it for and I finally have what I call my big girl camera. Yay!

Days of Christmas: Caramel Bacon Popcorn

I will be heading out shortly to another holiday sort of party, so this will be a short, sweet, to the point post. It involves bacon, sugar and popcorn, and I don't think you can go wrong with this combination. I love salted caramel, the sharp salty bite against the sweet, creamy caramel backdrop is awesome, so when I came across the blog I found this recipe on, I couldn't wait to try it.

Days of Christmas: Breakfast for the family

Merry, merry Christmas everyone! We've made it through the rush of Christmas, family and food and I am getting the chance to sit, relax and look back at the last 48 hours or so. I'll start with our family breakfast on Christmas morning.

Days of Christmas: Homemade Marshmallows and Hot Chocolate

First off, happy Christmas Eve everyone! I hope you and yours have a wonderful night tonight.

One of those things I've always wanted to try and make but never had were marshmallows. Up until recently, candy making of any type beyond my super easy fudge recipe kinda scared me. Candy sounds messy and easy to ruin, leaving you with a horribly burnt sugary mess to clean up.

Thankfully, I got over that. Making the candy favors for my sister's wedding certainly helped. A really good thermometer helps too, temperature is everything in making candy.

To go along with all the cookies I've made this year, I thought hot chocolate would be awesome. The nights are cooler, even in Southern California, and who doesn't like hot chocolate? And of course, with hot chocolate, you need marshmallows. This was my big chance to try and make my own.

Days of Christmas: Thumb print cookies

When I started digging out recipes for cookies, I found two that I was really excited for. Both involved rolling out very small portions of the cookie dough, refrigeration and other what nots for prep. I may have been able to get them all done if not for some time lost to an extra shift at work and some errand running prolonged by rainy weather.

Days of Christmas: A Chocolate family tradition

My Mom was a crazy baking lady for the holidays when we were kids. Lots and lots of cookies. A lot of work for a working of of 3, I still don't know quite how she did it. Lucky for her, she got three kids who don't mind being in the kitchen and cooking or baking. So as we grew up, we helped out.

Cookies, tamales, candy, we helped with it all. Yup, I said tamales. 2 years we did them. We should do them again, there isn't anything like homemade tamales.

I digress.

My days of Christmas.

I would call this my 12 days of Chrsitmas, but I really don't know how many recipes I will eventually post. This is good and bad. Good because I've used some really good recipes this year and I am excited to talk about them and have someplace where they are recorded for next year; bad because I've been eating a lot of cookies and such. And there is still more eating to be done between now and the new year.

Crash hot.

I know she didn't start it, but that Pioneer Woman certainly added to the internet love for crash hot potatoes. Google puts her right at the top if you do a search for a recipe. Ever since she posted her crash hot potatoes, I've seen recipes for them on many blogs.

And for some reason I resisted. It isn't as though I don't love potatoes, and I've succumbed to internet potato crazes before with excellent results. I just didn't feel the need to try and make potatoes that required a double cooking process. Why boil and then roast? Why not just boil and then mash or just roast them to start with? What could possibly be so special about this damn recipe?

Tis the season for broccoli.

I am sure the holiday season doesn't make you think of broccoli at all, but it is fully in season, and I pulled my first two crowns of broccoli out of my garden yesterday. Add to that the small, tender baby crowns of broccoli I had in my CSA box this week and I was ready for stir fry.

I love, love, love broccoli beef stir fry. I almost always get it when we eat Chinese food.  Stir frying is just so good for broccoli. It cooks it fast and keeps it crisp, nothing worse than soggy veggies.

A very late Thanksgiving run down.

Due to my work schedule and some technical difficulites, (meaning my laptop picked up a virus, yuck), I wasn't able to access the internet at all for about a week.  Now, my computer is STD free, I am relaxing after some time with friends and some extreme house painting and can finally getting around to talking about my Turkey day.

When I was thinking about how to do a round up of what I made and ate for Thanksgiving, I had a hard time deciding how to go about putting everything up here. Should I go with one post for each recipe? Should I break it down by type of side, like veggies one day, starches the next?

I ultimately decided, one because it is December 8th, and two I didn't manage to get good individual pictures of every. single. item. to just do a catch all type of post. Lots of links to recipes online ahead