Another messy Christmas cookie cooking post

On my last post I mentioned that I would start cooking when I got back from our Cub Scout meeting. Well.... That didn't happen. I was wiped out. I resumed baking at 8:00 a.m. this morning. I had to stop baking to bring The Cisco Kid to the doctor so he could get his H1N1 vaccine. The Cisco Kid is a maniac when it comes to getting shots. The last time he got a shot it took the doctor and two nurses to hold him down. The boy is strong. Taking everything into consideration I decided that the nasal spray vaccine would be the best. The difference between the two is, the shot is inactive and the nasal spray is live Attenuated. We go back in 30 days for the booster.
Well….back to baking my Christmas cookies. I did 2oo cookies today. Total count between yesterday and today is 355 cookies. I still have allot more cookies to bake.

Smores

Oat rageous chocolate chip peanut butter
Almond Cups

Update from my last post.

I am up to my elbows in baking. I am on a serious quest to get these cookies done.
So far I have made the Almond Rugalas and Almond Crescents. I have 135 cookies baked and hundreds more to go.
The true story about cooking!!! It doesn't always look pretty. I have a huge mess to clean before I go to our Cub Scout meeting tonight. When I cook the Chief always says, it looks like my kitchen blew up. Well he is right. I will continue with the baking tonight when I get back from our Cub Scout meeting.
Until my next messy Christmas cookie cooking post.

OK!!!!! I'm going in

I have all my ingredients for the twelve different kinds of Christmas Cookies. Flour is going to start flying today. I hope to get most of it done. I have to mail them all out by this Saturday. I will continue to post my progress good or bad. Hopefully more good than bad.

Time is not on my side but having a good time is.

Oh my Gosh!!!!! Already it’s December 9, 2009, Christmas is coming fast. Only 15 day left. I am on a serious quest to get my seriously, ridiculously long list of things done on time. I can only blame myself for this massive list I put on myself.

I can make a big check mark next to getting The Cisco Kids picture taken with Santa. We have never seen Santa when it wasn’t crowded. We got the royal treatments from Santa. He came out to greet The Cisco Kid.
Santa spent some real quality time talking to him in detail about his gifts. Santa was so intrigued with the Cisco Kids requests of a telescope and a coin collecting book. They had to have been discussing coins for a good ten minutes. Santa had some interesting things to say.
After we got done visiting with Santa we went to the food court. I have never seen the food court so empty. We got our food and headed to a table when we saw they had put in a big screen TV and Sponge Bob Square Pants was on. The Cisco kid could not resist lounging and watching TV.My Christmas to do list in full swing. On one hand I’m knocking down my list. On the other hand my list is building. One of the extra things that were added to my list is to plan a Christmas party for my son’s 1st grade class.

On top of making my annual ornaments for family and friends, my family likes me to put together a gift registry so they know what to get for the Cisco Kid, putting up all my trees, decorating the house, putting up the light outside, putting up our annual train tracks, shopping for coordinating clothes for the picture, the anual picture with Santa, the anual family picture for our Christmas cards, baking my Christmas cookies, finish shopping for the Cisco Kid and the rest of the family. We are still planning a Disney trip this month. Our dear friends (Life is a bowl of Cherry’s) daughter is in the Nutcracker this year and we are looking forward to seeing her performance. Last but not least.... Our 1st annual Cub Scouts Christmas party.

So far I have completed
√ I have all my ornaments completed.
√ All my Christmas trees are up and the house is decorated.
√ I got all coordinating clothes.
√ The Chief finished the outside lights.
√ The Cisco Kid got his picture taken with Santa last night.
√ Got the toy registry out.
√ Train and tracks are all up and running.

These things I don’t usually think about until the last minute and that is wrapping all the gifts. I love to make all my name tags. I hope I have enough time for that this year.

Calzone

These are the calzones I made for Thanksgiving. I made them smaller for hor’dourves. Usually when I make them it’s for the main dish and they are much bigger. You can serve them with a side of tomato sauce. You can stuff them with anything you like. There is only one rule for the mix. Always use ricotta cheese and the mozzarella cheese. That is the main ingredient for calzones. Another words, those two ingredients makes a calzone, a calzone.

Ingredients:
1 lbs. Pizza dough
15 oz. Ricotta cheese
2 cups of Mozzarella cheese
1 family size bag of fresh spinach
7 oz. ham steak cut in small cubes
2 cloves of fresh garlic chopped
2 eggs
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Scramble one egg and set aside.
Mix all remaining ingredients together.
Roll out the pizza dough to about a ¼ inch thickness.
Use a 5 inch circle cutter to cut the individual calzones
Put one heaping teaspoon of mixture on one side of the dough.
Dip a brush in the scrambled egg and moisten along the edge of the dough.
Fold the dough over the mixture and press closed with a fork.
Place on a lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

makes 7 Calzones

Dwindling down the Christmas list

I can check off this one on my list. Finally I have all five of my Christmas trees up. We make a little tradition out of decorating the tree. I put Rudolph the red nosed raindeer on TV and we decorate the tree while drinking hot coco. The Cisco Kid enjoyed climbing on the ladder more than decorating this tree. My first tree is a very traditional style 9 ft. tree. I have ornaments that I have been collecting over the past thirty years. I love the Christmas cartoon Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, so I have a collection of all the characters. I also love collecting the Toy Maker Santa by Hallmark. Since our family is really into trains we have a large variety of them on the tree. Every year I make ornaments to keep and to give as gifts so I have a collection of them as well.

Hallmark's toy maker santa



One of the ornaments I painted, jeweled and added the ribbon.
My oldest dated ornament my mother gave me.






My second tree is in my formal living room. It's a 6-1/2 tree. I loved the idea of having a very fancy tree. I decided to decorate it in Crystals and pearl. I actually lucked out two years ago at an estate sale and came across about thirty of these ornaments for $15.00.







My third tree is in my dining room. I call it my skinny tree. This tree is 7 ft. I wanted it to be 9 ft tall when I decided to make a tree stand for it out of a planter. I leveled a PVC pipe in the planter that was just the right size for the bottom of the tree to fit into. I then filled the planter with quick drying cement so the tree would not tip over.

I had this tree in my family room last year and a section of the lights did not work anymore. I could not bring myself to get rid of the tree when I saw a program on HGTV. They had an old tree that they spray painted gold. It looked great. When I saw that program I had to try it on my tree. The 1st thing I did was cut all the lights off. Then I spray painted it with gold spray paint. I really didn’t know what theme I wanted for the dining room so I went deep into the storage room and pulled out some boxes of old Christmas stuff that I have not seen in many years. I came across some red lights, Gold ribbon and lots of huge plastic ornaments. Well this is what i ended up with.

x Large ornaments
Another x large ornament.
Our 4th tree is The Cisco Kids Tree. Last year he saw this blue tree and flipped. Well he was so excited about it I just could not say no. He loves having his very own Christmas tree in his bedroom. I bought him a few decorations from John Deer, Disney cars and of course fire trucks and trains. As we were decorating the tree it was not full enough with ornaments. I thought there has to be some toys we could hang on the tree. Then I thought, lets look in the Mc Donald’s drawer. Yes we have a Mc Donald’s drawer filled with Kid meal toys!!!!! He has really accumulated a lot of toys for a boy that only eats Mc Donald’s once a week the majority of the time. Anyway ……. There were some really cool toys that we filled up the tree with. At least those Mc Donald’s toys come in handy for something.






Mc Donalds Happy meal toys
He loved the Sponge Bob ribbon.


Saving the best for last. I have been collecting ornaments with the Cisco Kids name on them since he was born.

I was hoping to have these trees done by Friday so I could join Kelly in Show us your life. It was fun doing them with the Chief and the Cisco kid this weekend, now to work on the rest of my Christmas list.