What?  A first?  Yes, this is the first year I have cooked Christmas Dinner all by myself.  I picked the menu, assembled the recipes, bought the ingredients, and managed the workforce.  The end result?  Three buffet dishes for breakfast at the relatives and dinner for my brood and some friends.

BREAKFAST

Cheddar-Sausage Breakfast Quiche
Sweet Ricotta Breakfast Quiche
Baked Brie with Apples & Cranberries

DINNER

Baked Ham
Au Gratin Potatoes
Paula Deen’s Sweet Potato Casserole
Green Beans
Cranberry Orange Salad
Deviled Eggs
Pecan Pie
Pumpkin Pie

Cooking is the area I am best at expressing my creativity.  It was a wonderful gift for me to be able to pour so much of myself into this simple meal.  Why, then, is the the first Christmas Dinner I’ve cooked this decade?  Simple.  My mother is usually in my kitchen for the holidays and I learned a long time ago to just let her do it her way.  If I want to change my mother’s cooking habits all I have to do is tell her how I do it and guaranteed she will do the opposite.  In the interest of family peace, I live with the same, old bland and boring holiday food every year.  (Well, except for the homemade noodles.  My mother makes exceptional noodles!)  This year she and my sisters stayed in Missouri and we stayed in Kentucky.  Really a win-win if you ask me!

Ingredients

1 lb bulk breakfast sausage
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
4 eggs
1 cup milk or half-and-half
1 tsp ground mustard
Salt & Pepper to taste
1 8″ pie crust

Directions:

• Brown sausage in a skillet and remove with a slotted spoon – you can also let the sausage drain on a paper towel to remove even more fat
• Place crust in pie plate
• Arrange sausage on bottom of crust
• Sprinkle cheese on top of sausage
• Whisk together eggs, milk, ground mustard, and salt & pepper
• Pour egg mixture slowly over cheese and sausage
• Bake uncovered at 350F for 35-40 minutes ~ eggs shouldn’t be jiggly when it’s finished

This recipe was modified from Paula Deen’s Sausage Quiche from the website grandparents.com. I like to add mustard to my sausage quiche and I also wanted more eggs and less milk.

Yummy!

I’m not going to give specific ingredient amounts for this recipe, because it’s very easily adapted to however many people you want to serve.

Basic Ingredients:

Potatoes
Shredded Sharp Cheddar Cheese
Flour
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg
Paprika

Directions:

• Choose an oven-safe casserole dish that will accommodate the number of people you’ll be serving
• Thinly slice potatoes in a single layer in the bottom of the dish
• Sprinkle lightly with flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg – remember, the seasoning will be in each layer, so don’t be too heavy-handed
• Sprinkle a layer of shredded cheddar cheese
• Repeat layers until casserole is filled

• For every 1 1/2 quarts of casserole, make a mixture of 1/4 cup melted butter in 1 1/4 cups milk and pour it over the layers
• Garnish with a sprinkle of paprika

Bake covered at 325F for 1 1/2 hours, or until a nice golden-brown crust forms on top and potatoes are tender.

The more you make, the longer it will take to cook. For Christmas Dinner I made enough casserole to fill a 3 quart dish and I baked it for 2 hours at 350F. I had other dishes in the oven, so 350 was my only choice. :p

This recipe is adapted from Marcia Adam’ Old-Fashioned Escalloped Potatoes in Cooking from Quilt Country: Hearty Recipes from Amish and Mennonite Kitchens.

Bratwurst made with venison.  Or would it be called bratwurst-seasoned venison since brats are typically made with pork?

“If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.”

~ Fernand Point

FOR DINNER

FOR ME

TWO TO GIVE AWAY and ONE TO FREEZE

Aren’t these vegetables gorgeous?

The gorgeous picture along with the fact that this is the THIRD batch of this soup I’ve made in the last two weeks inspired me to blog the recipe.  Even when we don’t have The Flu, this soup is still wonderfully delish!  Credit for the recipe goes to my e-maginary friend Chloe, a fellow Sonlighter who shared this recipe with us over two years ago.

Chloe’s Famous Virus Killing Soup

• One chicken
• Appx 15-30 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 1 Tbs salt
• 3-4 Thyme sprigs
• Cayenne pepper (to taste. I use about a tsp)
• Fresh Rosemary sprigs
• Fresh ground pepper

Place chicken and other ingredients in a soup pot (I use my pressure cooker) and cover with water or chicken broth (I really like those boxes of organic chicken broth). Cook on stove top until chicken starts to fall apart. Remove from heat. Strain out chicken and stuff and set aside until cool enough to chop. Reserve broth for next step.

• 1 large onion (coarsely chopped or sliced)
• 1 fennel bulb (sliced thin)
• 1 leek (sliced thin)
• 4-6 stalks of celery (coarse chopped)
• large red pepper (coarse chopped)
• 1/2 lb. carrots (coarse chopped)

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1/2 C good White Wine
• salt and pepper

Place oil in bottom of large pot and heat. Add onion, fennel, celery, pepper and leek and saute until onion just transparent. Add wine and simmer for 3-4 minutes. Cover the vegetables with chicken broth from chicken–add more broth from can or box if you don’t have enough broth from chicken and simmer veggies until just tender.

• Frozen green beans
• Frozen peas
• zucchini
• flat leaf parsely (chopped)
• 1-2 cans chopped tomatoes with juice
• salt and pepper to taste

Add these above ingredients and simmer until everything is tender. Add chopped chicken, salt and pepper to taste.

No virus can withstand this soup.

You can also add cabbage with the end ingredients if you like (We love cabbage!), or any other veggies your family likes.   Go ahead and throw in whatever’s in your vegie bin!     The next day add egg noodles and turn it into chicken noodle soup.

After canning hundreds of jars of jam, jelly, and fruit over the last few years I have been very, very lucky. Until today.

I broke my first jar of jelly in the canner!

Am I a real country woman now?

Tonight is our monthly fellowship dinner at our church.  There is nothing better getting together with folks you love and EATING.  Especially when there are others to help with the clean-up.

I’m bringing:

• Nachos with Beef and Black Beans
• Pica de Gallo
• Refrigerator Pickles
• White Cake with Fruit Topping <courtesy of Princess the Baker>
• Escalloped Tomatoes

After moving to the rural south I *finally* learned what all those strange Tupperware contraptions are for!

I had a life lesson this week.

Frequently I’ll search blogs for tea party ideas and this week I stumbled across one for a self-avowed Tea Lover.  Right.  Tea Snob is a better description.  Why, you ask?  The author spewed on and on over several posts about the inferior quality of store-bought bagged tea and even went so far to say that using such things was akin to using nothing but dried grass.  Wow!

At first I was really affronted!  How dare she! But as the week went on, I realized I’m actually very sorry for her and all of those people out there like her.  I won’t deny that good quality loose-leaf tea is a wonderful treat.  That isn’t the point. Quality costs more because it almost always does taste better.

BUT, just because something is ‘better’ doesn’t make it the only thing nor does it mean that the cheaper option isn’t enjoyable.  And that’s why I feel sorry for this woman.   I can sit in my school nook with a steaming hot cup of Lipton with honey and get the same sense of cozy warmness I get from a cup of imported, expensive loose-leaf tea.  The difference is that when I don’t have enough money for expensive tea I can still sit in my nook and enjoy myself, where the other poor soul will only sit and think about what she had in the past or what she may have in the future.

There is much value in being content with our circumstances!

And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts

which drown men in destruction and perdition. 1 Timothy6:8-9