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Ok, ok, so my last post said we all get too much sugar during the holidays but a friend and I decided to make sweet treats for our husbands as gifts. She wanted to make homemade peanut butter cups and I made homemade peppermint patties. These were mostly pretty easy to make – make a filling of either peanuts ground with some sugar or powdered sugar with peppermint oil. Melt some chocolate. For the peanut butter cups, we put a teaspoon full of chocolate in a small muffin cup, add a peanut butter filling, and then top with more chocolate. Let cool to set.

For the mints, make the filling, freeze the filling,  and then dip in melted chocolate. The recipe said to put the patties on a rack so the excess chocolate would drip off.

Everything looked great until I tried to get the mints off the rack. They were so completely cooled that they were part of the rack and threatened to crack if I tried to pry them off. I was going to use a hairdryer to try and melt them enough to loosen them when my younger son grabbed the heat gun and had them off in seconds. Whew!
As you can see in the above right picture, we were inspired by Karen Solomon’s book “Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It.”
Thanks to the book we had some fun homemade gifts for the special guys in our lives. And thanks to Cara for her pictures in this post!

Not the kind you pull but the kind you eat. I know that during the holidays we all end up with way too much sugar all around us – cookies, desserts, candy from decorating the gingerbread houses. So I decided that I would make a savory gift for friends: Parmesan Crackers. To see the recipe and some of the techniques I used follow the jump. Continue reading →

For many years now I have made houses and invited friends over to decorate them. This tradition was originally started when my friend Ellen brought over houses and candy to let my boys make a house. They had so much fun that I continued the tradition in later years. Sometimes it was just for my boys, other times cousins were here and got to participate, and some years I made them for my husband’s team at work when we hosted that party. In fact, for one staff party I made an all time record number of houses – 18! This year’s party was friends and neighbors and only 8 houses were needed.

I kept seeing these beans at the market and some older women filling bags full of them. What were they? Why would they want to go to so much trouble – shelling all of those beans?
Then I saw the Well Preserved Blog post and decided to give them a try. I bought a 10 pound box of beans on Saturday, along with bunches of grapes and 20 pounds of tomatoes. It was going to be a busy weekend!
The beans and seasonings ready for the canner. Now on to the tomatoes for the pasta e fagioli.
Between the grapes and the tomatoes I gave the food mill a good workout, or maybe I got a good workout turning the handle? Either way, more food for the pantry.