holiday – Page 4 – Peaceful Reader

Weekend Cooking; New Year's Day Brunch recipe

This is what is cooking at my house right now!

I was a whirlwind yesterday; trying to get everything done. My goal was to begin the new year with a clean house and with the help of my new vacuum cleaner I accomplished that. I made three trips to various grocery stores to pick up items I needed. After shopping together husband and I made a light lunch for all five of us and then I set to the task of pretty much spending the rest of the day in the kitchen. I wanted to make the breakfast casserole that my mother-in-law created once before in my kitchen. My thought was to have something pre-made and extra yummy so I could properly relax today. After I finished making that I moved on to making dinner; my “family-famous” eggplant lasagna and two loaves of bread.

I got almost everything done on my list yesterday. I finished my 100 books in time; spending the whole morning immersed in Selznick’s Wonderstruck. I’m excited because last year I didn’t make it and really it seemed like such an attainable goal. It’s not unless you really read all the time or count picture books, which I choose not to. I also didn’t get my weekend cooking post completed yesterday like I’d planned but hey, I did what I could and feeding the family is pretty high up on the to-do list.

Here is the breakfast recipe we will be eating in about 30 minutes, if I can get the teenagers up…

Cinnamon Apple Baked French Toast Casserole

1 loaf French or Italian bread
8 farm fresh eggs
1/2 cup sugar, divided
3 1/2 cups milk
1 T. real vanilla
6-8 Apples, peeled, cored and sliced (McIntosh or Cortland, preferred)
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
2 T. butter
Maple syrup (warmed) for serving

Slice bread into 1 1/2-inch slices. Place the bread tightly together in a greased 13 x 9-inch glass baking dish. In a bowl beat together the eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, milk and vanilla. Pour half of egg mixture over bread slices. Place sliced apples over bread to cover and pour remaining egg mixture over the top. Mix remaining 1/4 cup sugar with cinnamon and nutmeg and sprinkle over top of dish. Dot casserole with butter slices. Cover and refrigerate over night.
In the morning remove foil or pan cover. Bake at 350* for 1 hour. Place a cookie sheet under glass dish as casserole may overflow a little. Remove from oven and let stand for 10 minutes before serving. Cut into big squares and serve with maple syrup.
Yum!

Later today we’re having black-eyed peas, salsa and spinach over brown rice for dinner. How many others participate in this tradition?

This post is connected to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme-drop by and check out all the food-related posts gathered there.

Happy New Year. Happy Reading.

Holly Jolly

Loads of game playing. These have all been played or attempted over the holiday.

Lots of eating.

Christmas afternoon-opening family gifts.

We’ve even redeemed a gift card already! Groovy Girl felt so grown up, getting her hair cut at my favorite Aveda salon.

We’ve snuggled up for movies and watched two episodes of Downton Abbey and several

episodes of Arthur.

Oh, the joy of everyone together!

Christmas Eve

We had a cozy day hanging out today. Even though we hoped to be all done with our shopping we still had a few things to finish up. My husband and I went out to look at a local appliance store which turned out to be closed so we continued on to get guinea pig food and a few other last minute gifts. While we were driving around with NPR on the radio David Sedaris read to us from his Santaland Diaries.

So there we are driving around, concerned with our day but laughing our troubles away as Sedaris’ recounts his brief (and hysterical) stint as an elf at Macy’s. I can’t get it to load on my computer for some reason or I’d have it here for you to listen to but the link is here if get the chance to listen. It was just what we needed. And right before that we heard Neil Gaiman on Wait, Wait don’t tell me. Love public radio!

Why, you ask, were we searching out an appliance store on Christmas Eve day? I know your curious…
The beautiful Sub-Zero that came with our old house died a sad and pitiful death two days ago. Now if it was a snowy Christmas we could use the outdoors to store our holiday groceries but that is not the case here-it has been balmy! No snow. Luckily our friend, Jason, saved us by bringing over his garage fridge and we are using that for the next month or so until we can research the best refrigerator for our galley kitchen. Thank you Jason!!

I hope you have a wonderful holiday however you celebrate-celebrate in style!
Merry Christmas to all!

Beautiful Holidays

(Nephew with Groovy Girl)

I’ve recently been holiday bashing because I had to go buy new lights. Our old wonderful blue lights that have circled our house for a mere four years started to fade to a pale yellow and then blah to nothing. Went to Target to replace those lights and brought a name brand kinda light. Name brand is the key word and I was disgusted as I was only buying one set of lights to cover a large-ish bush in our front yard. (we made a new plan to cover some of the greenery out front instead of the house…it’s cold here now, you know.) Truthfully I didn’t expect to cover the whole ding dang bush but I did think I would cover more than one fourth of it. Seriously. You buy a box of lights that shows an entire big bush covered and you expect certain things. Don’t.

(Teenage Boy, College friend, Handsome Husband

walking over T.giving break)

Wow. The light buying business totally sucked the Christmas spirit right out of me for a couple of days. That was it though. I’m done with the rant. This is just my public service announcement, for you. Don’t go buy Christmas lights and expect them to cover what you want. I do remember my parents with this huge long rope of multicolored lights for our large tree. It does not exist anymore. They now measure what would be half or a fourth of a tree or a bush and give you that amount in the box so you are forced to buy two to four more boxes of lights to decorate said tree or bush. Ugh. I’m done.

(My sweet brother)

To remind me of happier holiday moments I went back to my Thanksgiving photos. Viola. I feel better.
p.s. I had to wait a week to write this post so it would not be full of true holiday anger. This is my tamed down version of today’s greed and commercialism. The photos = true bliss.

Lazy Sunday

Crushing cumin for chili

I got left behind(on purpose) for church this morning because I didn’t get another good night sleep and my throat hurt. As a librarian I use my voice all day long during the week and by Friday night my voice is taxed. This was one of those weeks. As I made bread on Friday night I could feel the scratchiness, which was made worse by staying up late with my non-rising bread. I feel better today thanks to my extra morning sleep, tea and Vick’s.

I have chili on the stove cooking for a late dinner. I googled vegetarian chili because I’ve made all the chili’s from my cookbooks and I was looking for something new. I picked the one with unsweetened cocoa because it sounded warming. I made it as spicy as the recipe called for and hope my kids will try it. I made a back-up small pot of chili without all the spices for Groovy Girl, just in case. I altered the recipe by taking out the bulgar, using only two onions, and I didn’t have any cilantro.

I never (okay, occasionally) cook seperate meals for my children but I wanted the chili to kick and I don’t think she’ll be able to handle it. She likes kidney and black beans and she likes tomato soup so I just basically put those items together for her own chili. Just in case. I’m only going to serve it to her if she complains about the spice. I made cornbread from the directions on Bob’s Corn Meal package. This is a one of my husband’s favorite meals so let’s call it a pre-Valentine treat, shall we.

Tomorrow night we are making homemade pizzas for our family Valentine dinner. I already have the yeast proofing. Love to watch it bubble. Groovy Girl had a special dessert picked out from an American Girl calendar that arrived inside her first issue. I’m more of a bake-from-scratch kinda woman but this little recipe called for a boxed cake mix and canned frosting.

In hindsight we should have done the frosting ourselves because she picked a lemon cake mix and fluffy vanilla frosting for this sandwich cookie recipe. Myself I would have leaned more toward a chocolate cake mix with peanut butter frosting but hey, it was her dessert. We made it just as is but the dough was crumbly and dry so we added some water. They are out of the oven, frosted and hidden so when Teenage Boy and Big Daddy arrive home they won’t be the wiser.

Because I was left home today I had an unprecedented several (!) hours alone to read my book club choice for February; Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. At one point I started getting a little creeped out so I had to put the book down and fold some mundane laundry. I’m more than 3/4 done and bookclub is still a week away-wow, rare for me. Usually I’m rushing to finish my book over my lunchbreak the day of our meeting.

“A.G. “Sweetwiches”-our Valentine dessert)

How was your Sunday…
Are you ready for Monday?

I, sadly, had to purchase two plastic containers at the grocery store today. I’ve been doing really well on my plastic free February. I guess two isn’t too bad for the first 13 days of the month.