“Do you have the crockpot full of meatballs?” my mother asked me after I got out of my car. We’d just driven two vehicles to my uncle’s house for a holiday gathering. However, all the food was in my mother’s car, not mine.

“Uh, no,” I told her after a short pause. I couldn’t believe my mother was asking me this question. My mother, who compulsively checked the stove before leaving the house. My mother, who carefully staged all the food on the dining room table the night before departure so she wouldn’t forget anything. My mother, who made me top off my car’s coolant in the dark and cold on Christmas Eve so she wouldn’t worry about my car overheating on the drive down. How could my mother ever possibly misplace a crockpot full of meatballs?

“I carried them out and put them on the sidewalk by your trunk,” Sister-in-law chimed in. Two seconds later we all simultaneously made the same realization: We had left a crockpot full of meatballs on the sidewalk in front of [...]

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I am still getting back into the swing of things post-holidays. I don’t remember much from the time after I passed out into a sugar-induced coma. However, as the pictures below show, I was present for the lighting on my mother’s 60th birthday cake on Sunday.

Here we are lighting the cake.

And here we are still lighting the cake.

And here we are again, still lighting the cake, watching the frosting start to melt.

And finally, the cake is lit! My mother blew out the candles in one breath, proving that old age has not affected her lung capacity. Happy birthday, Mom! Here’s to 60 more years!

• Continue reading "Let them eat cake"

Thank you for all your cookie suggestions. I was tempted to try all of them, but eventually settled on making Boot Tracks because I got to use my waffle iron. I love kitchen gadgets, and the waffle iron is rarely used for anything other than waffles, so I thought I’d give it some quality time.

The Boot Tracks came out well, but I wouldn’t call them cookies. They were essentially brownies cooked in a waffle iron. I felt like I got snookered. However, if in the future you are ever making brownies and simply cannot wait 20 minutes for them to bake in the oven, let it be known that you can pull out your waffle iron or George Foreman grill and cook them in two minutes or less. If any of you think of trying this recipe, please, please, please remember to grease the waffle iron before cooking. Otherwise you’ll be scraping boot tracks off your waffle iron like mud off of a boot.

There were lots of lovely cookies at the exchange. One of the [...]

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Photo by Libär used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’m going to a Cookie Exchange Christmas party tomorrow, and I’m concerned. I’m working on losing the 40 pounds I gained during the worst of my headache, and cookies do not seem like the best way to do that. (And if anyone mentions “The Cookie Diet” I will stab your eyes out with my ballpoint pen. The PR company for that product is run by assholes and morons who aren’t competent enough to remove me from their email ist.) But, I want to see my friends, and they are throwing a cookie party, so I’m going. Everyone is supposed to bring a batch of cookies and then we exchange them so everyone gets a plate full of different treats.

Does anyone have a recipe for healthy cookies? Or is that term an oxymoron? If I can’t find a healthy cookie recipe, I figure I should find a recipe for cookies I hate. That way when I’m baking them I will not be tempted to lick the beaters and shove [...]

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I was walking down the toilet paper aisle at Kroger yesterday, when I was blindsided by this:

Either my local Kroger exists in a time bubble that has been forced one month into the future, or the managers are missing the month of November in their wall calendars, because as we all know, it is far, far, far too soon to be putting up Christmas trees.

• Continue reading "Christmas in November"