Category Archives: family

Christmas Cookies for Show-and-Eat

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The new favorite cookie this year was Salted Toffee. This was a happy accident sort of thing. We had come by a bag of mini Heath Bars, not something we normally would buy, and I didn’t want to end up eating them one-by-one, so after we ate a few I thought I would make cookies with the rest.

 

 

I’d seen recipes online for Heath Bar cookies, and I used one of them that didn’t have nuts. My version had a little less Heath ingredient, since we had snacked it down. The specialness I added was to combine some large-crystal sugar (Demerara) and coarse sea salt and roll the tops of the cookie-dough balls in that before baking.

Everyone loved these cookies. If that bird were real, he would have eaten the whole cookie by now. But he is painted on a pretty tray that May gave me for Christmas.

Soldier’s Joy brought the darlingest delicious thumbprint cookies that were filled with strawberry and rhubarb, and some chocolate-dipped dried apricots that combined to add to the visual appeal of the cookie platters.

Those bright-white round cookies are our only store-bought item, Pffernusse from Trader Joe’s that Mr. Glad wanted to try in memory of the cookies his German grandmother used to make.

The coconut-y balls are Date Delights, for which I’ll give you the recipe here. They are another chewy toffee-ish experience we have been creating ever since my grandma gave our family a tin full of them one Christmas past.

Date Delights

1 cube butter
1 cup cut-up pitted dates
1 beaten egg
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts
2 cups Rice Crispies
sweetened coconut flakes, about 7 oz.

In a 9×12 baking pan mix the walnuts and Rice Crispies. Set aside. In another bowl put the coconut flakes. 

In a saucepan melt the butter, and add the dates, egg and sugar. Stir all together in the saucepan and boil over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Remove from heat and beat in the vanilla, and immediately pour the candy mixture over the walnuts and cereal. Stir well. As soon as the mixture is cool enough to handle, form into balls and roll them in the coconut flakes. Cool.

The red squares in the foreground are Cranberry Jellies. I adapted a recipe from a past Sunset Magazine to make a treat that Pippin and I especially like. It’s refreshingly lacking in any fat except for walnuts, and is a nice chewy way to get your cranberry fix and add color to the display.

Cranberry Jellies

3 cups Trader Joe’s Cranberry-Orange Relish (2-16 oz. tubs)
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups water
13 envelopes plain gelatin
3 cups chopped walnuts

Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl (I used a stand mixer) and while the paddle is turning, gradually add the gelatin. When thoroughly mixed transfer to a saucepan and heat just until the gelatin is dissolved. Stir in the walnuts and pour the mixture into a 9×12 pan. Refrigerate until firm. Cut into small pieces and dust lightly with cornstarch. I don’t refrigerate them after this point.

Many times I’ve told myself that I must make fewer cookies at Christmas, but this year I realized that it’s one of my favorite things to do. I have so much fun thinking of the collage of different flavors and forms of the little sweets that I don’t even feel the need to eat them. It was long after Christmas Day that I even tried one of the new Peppermint Cream Cheese cookies I made this year.

But now by what is the Seventh Day of Christmas, as I finish up this post, and also New Year’s Eve, I’ve expanded the festive feelings by eating lots of cookies, too! They all taste as good as they look, or better. The last red plateful will go out of here this evening — I wish I could bring one to your house when I say Happy New Year!

Jello is so refreshing.

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When I was a child, a leafy-green salad was prepared almost every evening of the year, including on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Our custom was to eat our salad after the main course, but on many holidays the healthy bowlful was discovered too late, waiting forgotten on the kitchen counter, long after anyone had any appetite left.

GJ preparing heavy dishes

My husband’s family introduced me to the tradition of jello at Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law had a nice strawberry jello salad that our whole family came to appreciate because it was one item on the heavy-laden table that wasn’t calorie-dense and fat-heavy.

Over the decades since then we’ve had a variety of lighter dishes on our table for these feasts, including Korean Kale Salad and other salads that may seem odd to the typical palate but keep us feeling like our usual happy Glad folk. For many years we let the jello custom lapse, probably because it was too sweet, and we didn’t need another item that seemed to belong in the dessert category.

When half my life was past I discovered that I did love grapefruit after all, and I experimented with creating a gelatin salad recipe that would be less sweet, and would feature the refreshingly bitter-sour tang of grapefruit. I love grapefruit even more after having lived in Turkey briefly, where they spell it greypfrut. But I didn’t eat any jello there, so that is just name-dropping — even though as you can see the Turks did not drop the name when they were changing the spelling.


Here now is the current version of my gelatin salad. I have played around with it over the years, using coconut milk and pineapple juice at times, making a smaller batch, and adding fresh peeled orange sections when I had them. So it is definitely flexible  — try it with your own preferred flavors or handy ingredients.

Grapefruit Gelatin Salad

64 oz. Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Drink
7 envelopes unflavored gelatin granules
1 qt. L&A or any pineapple-coconut juice
1 cup sugar
peeled fresh orange sections or a large can crushed pineapple

Put about 6 cups of the Ruby Red in a pot and whisk in the gelatin. Heat these together until the gelatin is dissolved. Add and dissolve the sugar, remove from heat and add the remainder of the Ruby Red along with the pineapple-coconut juice.

Refrigerate the gelatin until partly jelled. Stir in the fruit and refrigerate again until firm. I think next time I will put some sweetened flaked coconut on the top.

About the size of the pan: The one I use holds more than 3 quarts, and this salad after the fruit is added comes right to the top. It would be easier and maybe prettier to use a jello mold or fluted pan(s); then when the fruit has been mixed in I could prepare the pans by putting some shredded coconut and even a few maraschino cherries before adding the gelatin-fruit mixture.

I’d very much like to hear from any of you who also have favorite salad or vegetable dishes that lighten up your holiday menus. Leave a comment or link me to your blog. Thanks in advance! Oh, and if you just have jello stories, as I do, please tell me those, too.

What We Found in the Grass

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I’m at my daughter Pippin’s home in the Northern California forest, getting ready for the arrival of Baby. While we’re waiting we’ve been taking lots of walks, including some similar to what I enjoyed three years ago when I reported in Meadow and Trees.

When I am walking with Pippin it often happens that she scoops something from the trail and drops it into my hand. A baby pine cone from a Ponderosa, or a feather that has fallen from a red-shafted flicker.

She will stop suddenly in the middle of the meadow because she spies a praying mantis in the grass. By comparison with her, I am blind. But once she takes a picture of something, I know that I want to take its picture too.

I snapped photos of bear scat and raccoon tracks, wild rose hips and an unknown feathery plant that grows in swaths, especially near the edge of the forest. I soaked up the scents of pine and grasses that were rising in the summer heat.

after the bear feasted on manzanita berries….
feathery plant

Pippin and I helped each other provide shade if needed in order to get better lighting on the little purple thistles that were in full sun under a blue September sky.

We kneeled down to do a serious photo shoot of the mantis and I attempted a movie to catch him moving his small head this way and that.

(Pippin Photo)
a non-stubby thistle

There are places where the dried-up meadow is sparse with stubby weeds and tiny stickers that get into my socks. I try to ignore the prickles because it’s no fun stopping for them every few minutes.

Our swish-swish through the grass is accompanied by the gentle clicks of sprays of tiny grasshoppers jumping every which way out of our way. Some of them crash against my chest.

After a while we get to a wetter area where the water sits longer in the spring. Now in late summer some of the swampy areas have dried up, and the algae has become a papery brown layer that stays at its previous level when it was a blanket floating on mountain runoff.

Blades of green marshy grass stick up through it like toothpicks holding it well above the current ground level, and lots more pale dead grass lies flattened  where the snow has weighed it down through many winters. As we tromped along, our boots breaking through the paper made a noise such as you might hear when marching through large cornflakes. Tiny frogs hopped out of our path and escaped being crunched.

pennyroyal

An apparently man-made channel runs on one side of the meadow and keeps the creek water from spreading out and making the entire area into a marsh. A solitary duck paddled fast into the reeds when we came near, where pennyroyal grew on the banks and long runners of wild raspberry snaked along the ground.

In addition to my camera loaded with pictures (even slanty ones like that below) I brought home the tiny cones, the feather, my weary feet and a warm peacefulness.