Holiday Tradition

I just love Thanksgiving.  I love when family gets together and visits and reminisces about holidays past.
As a child my parents and brother and I would go over to my grandparents house, a little over an hour away, for Thanksgiving.  I can remember the smell my grandfather's pipe and watching the balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on tv.  I can hear my mom and grandmother putting all the delicious food on the table and I can't wait to dig my fork into grandma's SPINACH CASSEROLE!

But my grandfather died in 1989 and my grandmother moved into a retirement community.  My grandmother was a spunky lady.  She was fun and energetic and she lived to be 100 years old.  Sadly she passed away three years ago.  But her and my grandfather's memory lives on.  Not only through the times we've shared but through her SPINACH CASSEROLE. 

Now that I'm married and have children of my own we have Thanksgiving at our house and I make my grandmother's SPINACH CASSEROLE.  Thanksgiving was a few weeks ago and my husband's cousin asked everyone at the table if we would like to share any holiday traditions that our families had.  I was able to share the story behind the spinach casserole they each had on their plates and I told them that I would forever make it in remembrance of my grandmother.

Susan then asked my dad if he remembered having this spinach casserole as a child.  He said "Oh yeah!"  He also added that they had it on other occasions too, not just Thanksgiving.

I do not have the recipe as it's in my head.  My mom has it and she keeps telling me that if I want it she can give it to me but I'd just as soon make it as I remember it.  It consists of chopped spinach, cream of mushroom soup, hard boiled eggs, cheddar cheese and bread crumbs layered about 2-3 times and the put in the oven for about 45 minutes.

Happy Thanksgiving (a little late) everyone!

Looks can be deceiving

I don't like to cook.  My husband is the chef in this house and he makes dinner every night.  But I like to bake... cookies, cakes, pies, you name it.  So when I came across this book called Two-Bite Cupcakes by Viola Goren I had to have it.  Just the photos on the front let you know that there is more to cupcakes than cake and icing:

And then when you flip through the book it definitely expands your mind to think outside the box, or cupcake liner as it were.  For example on page 104 there are "Sun-dried Tomato & Basil Cupcakes".  This will definitely be a finger food I'll be making this holiday season:

For breakfast you could serve up Sticky Bun Cupcakes (found on page 55):

There are, of course, more "sweet" cupcakes such as Snickers Cupcakes and Chocolate Porcupine Cupcakes.  But I believe my absolute favorite is going to be the Orange & Chocolate Cupcakes.  Wow how yummy is that? 

This is one of my secrets (and I'm glad to see that someone shares my taste buds): I LOVE orange and chocolate together.  And when I'm really craving these two flavors I've been known to buy orange sherbet and put Hershey's chocolate syrup all over it.

Today my little mini cupcake pans were just staring at me waiting for me to  bake something in them.  So for starters I bought a fudge brownie mix from the grocery store and made little brownie bites:

Wow don't they look delicious?!

Looks can be deceiving... they were as hard as ROCKS!!!  Or as my mom and I would say "They were as hard as HOCKEY PUCKS!"  But have no fear I made another batch that turned out yummy and chewy and chocolaty and delicious.

I will be adding a new segment to my blog posts and that will be baking because I do believe baking is a form of creativity.

Update on my knitting projects:

1.  I now have about 400 of the 725 beads strung onto my skein of yarn I will be making a beaded scarf out of.

2.  I started knitting my very first pair of socks!!  I have cast them onto my double pointed needles and have done about two rounds so far.  I am super excited but Ive never worked with needles this small, I'm used to working with size 11 (US) and my socks are on size 4 (US) needles.