Recipes•
on December 26th, 2005•
I hope everyone had a blessed Christmas. This year I made cookies and pies. I’m posting a sweet potato pie recipe I found on AllRecipes.com. It turned out to be really good!
I had way more potatoes that I needed so I ended up with six pies. I gave four away and placed one in the freezer. I ran out of vanilla extract so I decided to use a 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon. The addition of cinnamon turned out to be great for a first time sweet potatoe pie maker! Here is the recipe below.
INGREDIENTS:
* 3 sweet potatoes
* 1/2 cup butter, softened
* 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
(I added 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon)
* 2 1/2 cups white sugar
* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 4 eggs, beaten
* 3/4 cup evaporated milk
* 2 (9 in.) unbaked pie crusts
DIRECTIONS:
1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add sweet potatoes and cook until tender but still firm, about 30 minutes. Drain, cool, peel and mash. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, combine sweet potatoes, butter, sugar, vanilla and nutmeg. In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk and blend into the sweet potato mixture.
3. Pour into pie shells and bake in preheated oven for 60 minutes, or until done.
Recipes•
on December 24th, 2005•
I normally do cutout sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies. Since I did the pies this year, I decided to only do a few drop sugar cookies and use the gingerbread dough for the cutouts. Gingerbread cookies are my favorites and I found this great recipe about two years ago on Kraftfoods.com. I normally pack individual bags, but this year I found some pretty tins at Walmart.
INGREDIENTS
- 3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) butter, softened
- 3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 1 pk Butterscotch Flavor Instant Pudding Filling
- 1 egg
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tbsp ground ginger
- 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
DIRECTIONS
BEAT butter, sugar, dry pudding mix and egg in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Combine remaining ingredients. Gradually add to the pudding mixture, beating until well blended. Refrigerate 1 hour or until dough is firm.
ROLL out the dough on a lightly floured surface to a 1/4 inch thickness. Use a 4 inch gingerbread man cookie cutter (or any cookie cutters – I have a Christmas tree and star) to cut out the dough. Place cutouts on a greased baking sheet.
BAKE at 350 degrees F for 10-12 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Remove from the sheets. Cool on wire racks. Decorate as desired.
I have a NOTE about the baking time. My oven tends to cook faster, so I only cooked my cookies from 8-10 minutes. When baking I have learned you have to know your oven. Also, when you are baking batch after batch, at timer helps a lot!!!
Recipes•
on December 23rd, 2005•
I normally just bake cookies, but I decided to try cooking pies this year as well. I dug up a recipe I found a few years ago for Dutch Apple Pie. It was the first pie I ever tried to make. I made two one Thanksgiving and everyone loved it. I buy the ready made crust from the store so this recipe involves the pie filling and topping.
INGREDIENTS FOR PIE FILLING:
- 1/2 cup sugar
- Apples, to fill crust (I used red delicious, but I heard Granny Smith are the best)
- Cinnamon and nutmeg, to taste
INGREDIENTS FOR TOPPING:
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 3/4 cup flour
- 1/3 cup butter
DIRECTIONS:
Fill unbaked crust with peeled, sliced apples. Add 1/2 cup of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg to taste. Bake at 450 degrees F for 15 minutes. Take out of the oven.
(NOTE: Depending on your oven, mine seems to cook fast, I used 425 degrees on my second set of pies so the pie crust edging would not brown too fast.)
For the topping, cut the butter into the flour and sugar. Spoon the topping over the partially baked pie. Bake at 350 degrees F for an additional 45 minutes or until bubbly.
Enjoy… I’m enjoying this baking! 
Nonfiction•
on December 22nd, 2005•
Tomorrow I’m going to head out to the stores to complete my Christmas shopping. I’m mainly doing shopping for children, but I’m not looking forward to the toy sections. I do love looking at toys. They seem to get more sophisticated each year. There is always one or two that I run across that make me think, "Wow, I wish that was around when I was little." Instead of admiring the toys, I think I’m going to the book store. One thing my mom and aunts instilled in me was a love for books. I want to pass that appreciation on to the little ones on my list.
read more
Musings•
on December 22nd, 2005•
My cousin sent this to me. See if you can guess these common Christmas songs & carols from silly synonym sentences. I like puzzles, but I’m not very good with riddles. 
- Move hitherward the entire assembly of those who are loyal in their belief.
- Small municipality in Judea southeast of Jerusalem.
- Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious sounds.
- Nocturnal time-span of unbroken quietness.
- An emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good given to the terrestrial sphere.
- Embellish the interior passageways.
- Diminutive masculine master of skin covered percussion cylinders.
- Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of minute crystals.
- Expectation of arrival to populated area by mythical masculine perennial gift-giver.
- The first-person nominative plural of a triumvirate of Far Eastern heads of State.
- Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted metallic, resonant cups.
- In a distant location the existence of an improvised unit of newborn children’s slumber furniture.
The answers will be posted in the COMMENTS section.
FOR WRITERS•
on December 19th, 2005•
Each year I try to follow along with an Advent calendar, but I normally wind up forgetting about it. This year my church past out a set of readings for each day of Advent leading up to Christmas. I have kept the readings by my bedside so I can catch up with daily reading during the evenings. The mixture of readings, trivia and quizzes has introduced me to some interesting information. The one for today was about the meaning behind the song, “Twelve Days of Christmas.” I did some research and found a more in depth write-up about the song. This is some interesting reading if you enjoyed this fun song as a kid, but as an adult wondered how it fit in with the other Chritmas carols. Enjoy!
http://www.cresourcei.org/cy12days.html
Bible Study•
on December 6th, 2005•
My bible study group just finished our Fall study. It was one of the PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE bible study series. There are six studies in this series and we chose “Connecting with God’s Family.”
BOOK DESCRIPTION: God longs for you to have rich, genuine connections with him and a handful of other people. These six sessions will help you connect more deeply with Jesus Christ and build genuine relationships with Christian friends. Christ’s love makes it possible for you to be known and to know others, to be loved and to love, to resolve conflict effectively, and to move outward together in faith.
It was the second women’s bible study I have facilitated and I really enjoyed this study. This study came with a DVD and our DVD player at the church did not work that great sometimes… ok, well most of the time. That kind of distracted me. There was quite a bit material between the book and DVD and I found myself running over time. I think the study allowed the group to get to know each other better, so the extra few minutes did not hurt.
Our next study starts in January and we will be reading “The Power of Praying Together” by Stormie Omartian and Jack Hayford. I have read quite a few books by Stormie and this one looks to be a great one for discussion.
