Wordless Wednesday

Tell Me About It Tuesday - My Favorite Christmas Recipe

With Christmas just next week, I'm sure everyone is getting out their cookbooks and making their menus and grocery lists. One thing that is always on our holiday menu is my mother's dressing. Oh, it's delicious. This year, we've opted to have a less traditional "Appetizer" lunch, so it's not likely that this will be on the table, but as delicious as it is - I'm thinking it will probably make an appearance somewhere.

It does take awhile to make, but the results are totally worth it! If you're up for it, here are the directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Then, start a large pot of boiling water. Add some salt, pepper, garlic powder, and about 4 chicken bouillon cubes. Take a whole fryer (chicken), and place in the boiling water. You want it to boil for a good while - until your kitchen smells like chicken. But be careful, you don't want all of that liquid to be gone - you'll need it later.

As the chicken is boiling, take 3 boxes of Jiffy corn muffin mix and mix those up. (I believe you need an egg and ¼ of a cup of milk for each box). Mix that up and pour into a greased baking pan or cast iron skillet. Then, stick that into your pre-heated oven.

Fill a small saucepan with water, and boil 4-5 eggs.

While your cornbread is in the oven and your eggs and chicken are boiling, chop up a medium white onion and about 8 celery sticks. Take a medium skillet and put it over medium/high heat and melt a stick of butter. Then, sautee until onions are clear and celery is tender. Set to the side.

When the cornbread comes out of the oven, you want to crumble it up, as best you can. Use a spoon or a fork, so that you don't burn yourself. Add the crumbles to a large mixing bowl. Then add the celery, onions and butter and mix together. Season with salt, pepper, garlic powder, poultry seasoning and sage.

Peel and chop the hardboiled eggs and add them to the cornbread. Stir until eggs are combined well.

When the chicken is finished, pull it out of the water and place it in a casserole dish to cool. Once cooled, pull the meat off the bone, in shreds and add to the cornbread/vegetable mixture. Mix all together. Add some of the chicken broth to moisten and continue to stir, until everything is combined. Once combined, spoon into a casserole dish and spread out until even. Bake for 35-45 minutes or until golden brown.

Reserve the rest of the chicken broth to moisten dressing, as necessary.

My mother usually makes giblet gravy to go over the top of it, but I don't like giblet gravy so I'm omitting that part. The dressing is delicious and really doesn't need anything else!

Hope you'll make it and find out for yourself! Trust me, it's worth all the trouble!

Happy Cooking!

Making Cupcakes!

Auntie M, as I am sometimes refered to as, spent the weekend with these little cuties:

We painted, we made crafts and used glitter, we played outside, we made cupcakes, we played outside some more, we watched movies and made dinner and then the next day we watched more movies and played outside some more! We had a great (exhausting) weekend and I wouldn't have had it any other way. Aren't they adorable. And since everyone wanted to "stir", I gave everyone their own whisk. Which was fine, until 2 seconds after I took their picture and we had this:

Which resulted in batter being EVERYWHERE! But you know what - you only live once and what's a little red velvet cupcake batter on the counter, your arms, your jeans, their arms, their shirts, the floor and the dog if you're having a little fun, right? Happy Baking!

Sausage balls

The day after Thanksgiving, we went over to my sister-in-laws house and we all brought appetizers and we had a really casual appetizer lunch. One of the things that my mom used to make, but I haven't had in a million years is sausage balls.

This is a really easy appetizer, in case you have any holiday parties to go to. It requires very few ingredients, little to know prep, and delcious results. Who can beat that?

Sausage Balls

• 1 pound of ground pork sausage (such a Jimmy Dean's)
• 2 cups of Bisquick
• 1 bag of finely shredded cheddar cheese (I use mild)

This is the easiest part... Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and then just take (thawed) sausage and put it in a large mixing bowl. Then add the Bisquick. When you get it completely combined, add a little salt, ground black pepper and garlic power and mix until the seasonings are combined. Then, add the cheese a little at a time and mix until combined. Roll into balls and placed on a baking sheet that you've lined with parchment paper. Bake 18-20 minutes.

It's as easy as that! Just make sure that you break one of the balls open and check to make sure that the sausage is cooked all the way through. If it is, the others should be fine! Just let them cool and then you can pack them away in a tupperware!

These are always a big hit - wherever I take them. Hope you and your family and/or friends enjoy them as well!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

D and I decided not to put a Christmas Tree up this year. Mainly because we are so darn busy that we won't even be home to see it. I mean, the only free time we have is this weekend and we have about a million things on our to-do list... grocery shopping, Christmas shopping, wrapping, etc. so we won't really be able to enjoy it then either.

Another reason is because I just have a small 4' Christmas tree (I somehow managed to accidentally give my big one away). So, I want a new tree but I don't really want to spend the money right now, so D told me just to wait and that when we start having children, he would buy me a new one and we'd start from scratch.

The very next day, my Ballard Designs catalog came in the mail and I saw this...

Christmas Tree perfection!

Isn't it gorgeous? I would love for my living room to look like that. I don't think it ever will. I would need a little more color. And then you'd have to add the mess D makes, and all the bugs that Coco brings in. I don't think it would be quite the same, do you? Happy Decorating!

Wordless Wednesday

I know this is supposed to be Wordless, but I just want you to know that this picture is from Pottery Barn and shows everything that I aspire to be, at Christmas. I would LOVE for my porch to look like this!

Tell Me About It Tuesday - My Christmas Wish List

Can you believe that Christmas is just 18 days away? It just doesn't seem real to me. Of course, everyone has been talking a lot lately about what they want for Christmas. Initially, I wanted a Cricut machine - for crafting and scrapbooking but the more that I got to looking into it, I changed my mind. You have to continue to buy cartridges for it and there is an ongoing expense to owning that machine. Instead, I found the Silhouette SD machine. It's much like the Cricut machine, but you don't have to buy cartridges - it just plugs right in to your computer. That way, you can use all of the images and fonts that you currently have on your computer or whatever you can download from the internet. Neat, huh?

This is the Silhouette SD machine.

And this is some of the things that you can use it to make!

Vinyl lettering!

I want my front door to look like this!

You can even use it to embellish things you already have - like gift bags and boxes!

You can use it to make temporary tattoos, which happen to be a great way to "label" golf balls and small toys.

You can use it to make adorable cards.

And scrapbook pages!

It's more expensive than the Cricut, but I think it's totally worth the extra money! Instead of printing like a regular printer does, the laser cuts things out. I finally talked D into not exchanging Christmas gifts in lieu of putting money towards paying off our credit cards (again), so this might be on my wish list for awhile!

What do you want for Christmas?