Hello Everybody

Our holidays were wonderfully spent with family and friends (with still more celebrating to come tomorrow and again in the new year...it's an extended event in our families). Much fun was had with good food and good games (chairs (highly recommended if you can get your hands on it....it was a Christmas gift last year and I think we have the ONLY game) Blokus, and Guitar Hero III (I suck BTW)).

I'll be back in blogging business in the next couple days but I might need a day or two to recover and arrange my new kitchen. I was was spoilt and Mike bought me a complete set of Corelle Heartstone dishes and much of the serving trays and thing a my jiggies that you can get as well so I need to figure out where I'm going to store it all.

Enjoy whatever time you have left of the holidays and I'll see you back here more regularly by next week for sure. Looking forward to getting back into a more regular schedule.....holidays are nice....but so is routine!!   

Solstice

You darkness, that I come from, 
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
-  Rainer Maria Rilke, On Darkness

On this shortest day of the year take a moment to reflect on the darkness but then gracefully and graciously step into the light of a new day. Embrace those around you and celebrate a new dawn, a new light, a new day. Many blessing to you and yours as you celebrate solstice and Christmas with those that are dear to you and much love and light as you head into a new year filled with new beginnings.

Namaste....Blessed Be

Christmas Cookies

My absolute favorite part of the holidays is the baking. I have very fond memories of baking with my mother. She always made a wide array of cookies in the month leading up to Christmas: a caramel fudge square with red or green srinkles on top, a chocolate log filled with multicoloured marshmallows and rolled in coconut, nanimo bars, fruit cake (sometimes....I didn't get to help with this), short bread (with chopped up red or green marachino cherries on top), ginger bread, and I am sure there was many more. She'd keep them in a red container in the basement and I am sure that I wasn't the only one that would sneak one out on occasion. I loved that there was always an assortment of goodies for when someone stopped by. I loved that she'd attend an annual Christmas cookie exchange a come home with even more goodies. Most of all I loved spending time in the kitchen with my Mum.

It's definitely a tradition worth passing down......

My head hurts

I'm not around very much because my head hurts....it hurts lots.....almost all the time. I've started some really fun (yeah, right) medication and I have a few tests coming up (with the general consensus being that I having some funky facial neuralgia/migraine stuff of unknown origin that'll either get better or worst). I had high hopes that I would start this medication and the headaches would go away (which is why I mentioned that I would start posting more regularly again here...I figured I'd adjust to the medication) but instead I'm doped up and still have headaches so yeah, writing on a daily basis is the furthest thing from my mind (though I love you all to bits and I want to write I really REALLY want to). 

So anyways, I'm still around and I will post when I can....I will try to keep it interesting...and starting in the new year I'll have new ideas coming up (that I'll write in advance sometimes so even when I don't feel like writing you'll still have cool stuff to read...).

I'll get up a new Epicure recipe in the next day or two as well...I know you are all dying for something new (and NON-Newfie!!)

Umm, Winter Wonderland???

or Nightmare before Christmas? Another record snowfall here, folks, which leaves us with a record amount of snow for this time of the year with a forcast calling for snow for the next 4 days changing to rain (please, please, please, rain and not freezing rain) on the weekend.

We ended up staying with the inlaws yesterday and when we came home the lovely plow had pile a lovely border of snow into our drivway that was OVER the top of my 4 1/2 year old sons head. So that's what we've been doing today (oh, yes, of course my man took time out to go snowboarding!!). We've got to keep up with it because it it rains on top of this we're finished, it's the end, caput.

Don't you love winter? 

Holiday Giving

So along with holidays comes the made rush to finish up all the countless projects the I've begun in the previous weeks that were to become gifts for unsuspecting (and suspecting) people.

This year we have matching hats for the family....mine and Liam's are completed. Here is Daddy's:

And Morgaine's (a ways to go on that one, eh?)

I'm also doing a skirt for Morgaine. A simple in the round pattern from me head decreasing with an i-cord at the top. I still have a ways to go. We are relatively modest here (AKA Mike) so this dress needs to be significantly longer.  I haven't any idea how it will turn out (the picture is really bad too).

Oh, and here's my biggest project that so will not get done, aprons and paint smocks for the kids out of an old sheet. I really had good intentions of pulling out my sewing machine before the end of the year (see 10 things to do before the end of the year) but I don't see it happening any more with just a little over a week before the holiday and a ton of other things going on in between now and then.

Sometimes it's the thought that counts though, right?

Let the holiday rush begin!!!

Playing the Newfie Card-Fish Cakes

Okay, since Toutons seem to have gotten my blog the most views ever at 50 (WOW, eh?) Mike suggested I play the Newfie card again and come up with another Newfie recipe. This was not my idea and I have to say that I have been putting off making this meal for a year (yes, Rick, a whole year *hanging head in shame*).

I don't live in Newfoundland anymore so I don't get Newfie treats very often. In fact I haven't been back in YEARS. Luckily enough my sister found herself a Newfie man though so when we go up her way we sometimes get treated to some good old Purity goodies (ooh, the peppermint nobs and Lemon Cream Biscuits). Last November (2006) though we got a tin of Purity salt fish. Now, I like salt fish and all. Any good Newfie does. But well, I like, my salt fish from the ocean and not from a tin so this can of fish kicked around our cupboard for a year with Mike occasionally asking me what my plans were for it. i told him he could do what he wanted with it because I wasn't going to touch the stuff (and the longer it was there the less likely I ever would touch it).

Well, last Friday, we ran out of food again. We'd had wonderful success with the toutons on the blog the day before and Mike was like "Come on, we have to eat. Do the Newfie thing and make fish cakes." So well, I was hungry, I didn't want to argue over a tin of fish so here you go.

Newfoundland Fish Cakes   

• 1 can of Purity salt fish


• 5-7 potatoes


• 1 medium onion


• oil or salt pork to fry fish cakes


• milk


• butter or margerine


• flour

Peel and wash potatoes and boil til cooked.

Open can of salt fish and admire (such a pretty happy label).

Fry onion and salt fish in a little bit of oil until onions are cooked well.

Mix potatoes, milk and butter til you get a mashed potato like mixture (it doesn't have to be as smooth...some people don't add the milk and butter but we like the consistancy it gives...I don't add quite as much as I would to mashed potatoes though. Add the salt fish mixture and blend well.

Roll mixture into balls and press into hamburger pattie forms (you'll want to flour your hands...this is a sticky job). Coat with flour and fry until gloden.

Serve.

These were so good that I didn't have to cover them with mustard like I did when I was a child to force them down. I have to say that I was beyond pleasantly surprised with this meal so if you are reading this Rick and you'd like to send down and a tin or two (or five) of salt fish and some peppermint nobs feel free *laughs*.

Wood Brown Table

In honour of Steel White Table. Views of my site have gone up astronomically (from 3 to a few more) since I got mention in their blog last week. How cool is that? Perhaps it's just Jody drooling over my pesto but I still feel it deserves mention!

PS. Yes, I asked Mike to clean the table before he took the picture, but did he?

Salt Dough Memories

When I was a kid there was a decoration that hung on our Christmas tree that absolutely scared the bejeepers out of me every year. I was (and probably still am to some degree) a complete germ o phobe. There was this ugly (so to my sister's who might be reading this who might have made this lovely decoration) man (i suppose gingerbread guy) made out of salt dough and being a kid I couldn't understand how a cookie could stay good all those years, what with the milk and eggs in it, you know? So I hated this decoration. I was scared of it. I wanted nothing to do with it. No one ever explained to me that there was nothing in this guy to go bad. That he was purly salt and flour. Oh, the trauma that I could have been spared.

Then there was the time in, I think, grade 3 when we made salt dough in class and I was ever so proud of my creation. Tied up with it's little green twist tie I held in in my hand ever so carefully on my way home from school so it wouldn't get lost in the bottom of my backpack. I was so excited. It was winter. There was a lot of snow. I droped my salt dough off the side of the hill on the way home and it got burried under deep fluffy snow. I tried to find it. I dug. But I just couldn't. I was soooooo upset. I found my salt dough in the spring. It was soggy. I hated the smell of salt dough from that moment on.

I swept all memories of salt dough from my mind actually until a couple weeks ago and salt dough starting coming up in conversations every where- at play group, in other blogs I frequent, on my message boards. So, I took it as a sign that I needed to make salt dough.

So that is what I did.....mine is cinnamon scented though!!

Newfoundland Toutons

Yes, I am a Newfie (and darn proud of it)!

So, I have a splitting headache. I've had a splitting headache since yesterday morning and I've done EVERYTHING imaginable to try and get rid of it, to no avail. This morning my daughter got up insisting that I get her BREAKFAST. Picture this. I stumbled-half drugged, half asleep- out of bed (which pretty much means I'm really not there). I'm gropped around for my glasses I can't find and she's yelling at me for BREAKFAST. "Breakfast cereal or Breakfast bread" I say as I haul on my robe.

"BREAKFAST" she insists.

"Do you want a banana? An orange?" I finally find my glasses and stumble on out into the kitchen an open the fridge door.

"BREAKFAST!!!"

This goes on and on with me naming every breakfast food I can think of. I'm loosing my patience. I am tired. I want to crawl back in bed. I desperately go into the room where Mike is laying there and he says "she's so pleasant this morning, isn't she?" All the while the kid is screaming, screaming, SCREAMING and I am getting very near wanted to run and hide under my bed.

Finally, a breakthrough "Syrup, breakfast" she says.

"Oh, I say, you want pancakes".

"Pancakes." she replies.

I don't feel like making pancakes at 7am. She screams and cries. We convince her that I'm going to rest for half and hour and then I'll get up and make pancakes. "I PROMISE."

So half and hour later I drag myself out of bed and there are no eggs in the fridge. What do you do? Make Newfie toutons. I mean all you need is flour and water and a little bit of yeast. Who doesn't have that? So at 7:45 this morning I am making homemade bread dough so that we can have toutons for breakfast. I'm cheating and I'm going to send you here for the recipe as I love  the guys over at  Steel White Table for the sheer randomness of their posts and their little taste of home every now and again.

So anyways, an hour later we sit down to a meal of newfoundland toutons minus the salt pork and molassas (can you tell I really wasn't prepared for toutons this morning either?). It's a Newfie treat we have maybe twice a year by b'y is it some good.

 

For those that can't wait a moment longer

Before

After

Styled a la Katrina

I'm not sure what I think of the white blond tuft of high-lights they added at the front but in reality I have a very white tuft of natural high light their so I guess their theory is when my hair grows out the grey won't be so noticable!!!

Oh, and I have to say that Liam is REALLY mad at me because he want them to make my hair long. He is totally into princesses and wants my hair to be down to my bum. So this is the last time I get to go short. I've made a promise to my little man that I was going to let it grow for him.

Snow Day

Today brought record breaking snowfall to our part of the world and we enjoyed it to the fullest. It's such a pleasure to take the children out when the snow is gently falling and it's just the right temperature to be comfortable. There are not many days that are just perfect. Today was one of them. I would not have changed a minute  of it.

Nothing is better then rosy, healthy cheeks of my children.

No snow day is complete without hot caoco.

Knitting by the Christmas tree.

Spiced ginger butternut squash soup