So today is Orthodox Christmas. Widely celebrated in Eastern Europe and Medetarrian countries, I still call it Greek Christmas for two reasons. One because I’m half Greek and that’s why I celebrate it (duh) and two because 95% of the population of Greece is Orthodox while the numbers are smaller (though still fairly high) in other area of Europe (87% in Romania for example, 80% in Ukraine, etc). So Happy Greek Christmas. Or as my mother and my aunts and uncles would say, Xronia Polla!

In Canada, we normally don’t celebrate it much at all. We’ll usually have dinner together but that’s no different from any other Sunday. Being so far from everyone right now though, I feel the need to celebrate extra the little things. Even though it doesn’t directly involve our families I think it keeps the kids engaged and remembering. So we made Amygdalota me Orange (aka Orange Scented Almond Cookies) to celebrate! Usually I make Kourabiethes or Melomakarona but I can only make those when I know there are a bunch of other people around to eat them because otherwise I am in serious danger of eating them all myself. These cookies though, they make a smaller batch and they are a little more transportable. I’ll be mailing this batch to my folks. <3 These are officially my second cookie of 2013!

Amygdalota me Orange via Cat Cora 3 cups blanched almonds 3 cups confectioners sugar 1 tablespoon orange water 1/4 cup orange juice, plus some for shaping First, process the almonds into a almond meal, and add 2 1/2 cups sugar. Then pour the mixture into a saucepan over medium high heat. Add the orange water and the orange juice and mix it until the sugar as dissolved and the liquids are all mixed in. Cool. From here, you can shape it into the traditional pear shape or you can chop it into chunks instead. Either way, roll it through icing sugar, wrap it in cellophane and leave it for three days before you serve it. In my case it’ll take about 4 days to mail to my parents so it should be perfect by the time they get it.

We spent New Years Day playing board games and the little ones ate way too many cookies and chocolate almond milk, but I tried to level it out with some hidden kale in dinner and I’m going to go ahead and call that a win! Two of the games we played on Tuesday were the Pinkalicious Cup Cake Party Game, super fun for Wee One #2, and the Super Why ABC Letter Preschool Game, which totally worked for both Wee Ones #2 & 3. The Pinkalicious game reminded me a lot of Partini, but for kids. You roll the dice and you draw a card from the deck that matches the icon you rolled. You’re either doing charades, drawing, rhyming or dancing. After you perform the task on the matching card you earn a cupcake and the first person to get 6 cupcakes wins! You also have the possibility of rolling two other icons (duh), one gives you a free cupcake, one takes a cupcake away. Wee One #3 wasn’t huge on the rhyming or the charades and seemed to think it was pretty lame. Yeah, my three year old was too cool for it – and that’s fine because this game was technically for Wee One #2 who loved it so much she insisted we play it again after her menacing toddler sister went to bed.

The game we picked up specifically for said menacing toddler was the Super Why game, since that is one of her favorite shows and one of the few shows that actually teaches kids something useful! The show (and the game) focus on letter sounds and early reading. My seven year old liked this game because it was easy for her, but the littlest one liked it a lot too and it’s so neat to see the connections she makes and the little spark that goes off when she finally ‘gets’ something. In this game, there is a spinner instead of dice and you move around the board and land on one of four Super Why characters. Each of the four characters has their own deck of cards and each has the kids practicing a different reading skill – either you match a lower case on your card to the upper case of the same letter on the board, find the letter that the picture on the card starts with, rhyme with the words on the card or you replace a silly word in a phrase with a word that makes sense.

This recipe is my first cookie of 2013. Technically, I made these for New Years Eve, but since they ushered in the new year I’m counting them! It shouldn’t come as a surprise at all that I am posting a Martha Stewart recipe as my first of the year since I’ve been cooking and baking my way through her books since I was a teenager at my parent’s house cooking for their friends on Friday nights!

Soft & Chewy (M&M) Chocolate Chip Cookies – via Martha Stewart

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 cups semisweet and/or milk chocolate chips
1 cup plain chocolate M&Ms

My granny would dump M&Ms into her standard chocolate chip cookies sometimes if I was in the kitchen with her. It kept the grown ups from eating them all and my sister and I loved them even more this way. This is your standard sift together the dry, cream the butter and sugar, add eggs and then add dry to wet style cookie recipes.

To clarify…whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Cream the butter and both sugars together, then add the eggs one at a time and the vanilla. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet and then stir in the chocolate chips and M&Ms. Bake at 350 for about 11 minutes.

I love New Years Eve! We never really do anything epic, but it’s the traditions that make it epic for us. As a kid and teenager, I always spent it with my parents, my sister and my grandparents. My granny would make her tuna, salmon, egg and sometimes chicken bouchees. My mother always made a bunt cake and stuck a coin in it. Then she’d cut pieces and name them for people in a very specific order, whoever gets the coin is supposed to have great luck that year! Instead of a bunt cake, the traditional Greek New Year’s cake to slip a coin into is called the Vasiliopita. Interesting that the tradition itself comes from the name day (Greeks celebrate name days almost as seriously as we celebrate birthdays) that lands on Jan 1 (Saint Vasili the Great). This saint would distribute cakes with coins hidden inside them to the poor people in his parish. Ha! Snuck in a random history lesson! We always cut a piece for all the poor people in the world, and this year that’s who got the coin!

Here’s the recipe I used this year! Wee One #2 helped, it was pretty simple and despite having six eggs in it, we tried it and it was really good!!

1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 3 cups flour 6 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder	1 cup warm milk 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1/4 cup chopped almonds 1/4 cup white sugar

I had a three year old ‘helper’ making this with me and it still came together quickly!

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a 10″ cake pan. Cream the butter and the sugar, then stir in the flour until the mixture looks like almond meal. Add the eggs. One. At. A. Time. Mix the baking powder and milk and then add that to the egg mixture. Now mix the lemon juice and baking soda and add that to the mixture as well. Pour into your cake pan and bake for 20 minutes. Sprinkle the top of the (half baked) cake with the chopped almonds and sugar and bake for another 45 minutes. Mine baked up so tall and grand the almond and sugar on top looked so pretty!

Anyhoo, the first couple of years after my husband and I got together we celebrated just as I had done as a kid, with my folks and after the little ones started coming, we started rotating where we’d spend Christmas and New Years. It was either laid back with my folks or his. There was one year when a few of my girlfriends came over and we knitted through the countdown. Since then I try to do that where ever I happen to be celebrating. This year we are thankful to be able to say we have made a lot of great friends here already, but when it comes to New Years they are generally divided into two groups. Those with kids that celebrate with family, and those without kids that celebrate with shots.

Both are equally fun, but we have decided to start a new tradition – settling in with fun treats for the littles, and savory treats for us. A kid’s countdown at 9pm PST was perfect because that’s midnight in Ontario, and gave me time to get the littles to bed before the actual countdown at midnight!

*I think the teeny nerds-encrusted martini glasses with dark chocolate almond milk helped make this NYE a little different, and special, for the little ones.

We had a lovely New Years Eve and plan to spend our entire New Years Day playing board games and watching Dinosaur Train. I love me some resolutions and I’ve been getting better at sticking to them so here’s my official list for 2013.

1) read 52 books

2) sew a dress for myself

3) send everyone a card for their birthday

4) make candles

5) hand write and mail (at least) 52 letters

6) knit this quilt (202/400 puffs)

7) knit 12 pairs of socks

8 ) bake one new cookie recipe every week – and blog about it

9) make a small quilt

10) start a ‘What I did today’ daily journal project (I really like the index card one)

11) participate in Craftster’s Monthly Challenge

12) go on at least one epic road trip and as many smaller ones as possible

Let’s recap how I did with my to-do of 2012, shaaaall we?
1) read 52 books (24/52) – So I fell 28 books shy of my goal. Instead of lowering it, I’m going to aim for 52 again in 2013.

2) sew a dress for myself – No excuse. I even bought a new sewing machine after leaving mine in Canada! Back on the list for 2013.

3) send everyone a card for their birthday – I came reeeeally close but I can’t cross it off because I did overlook a few and some were crazy late. Hoping to manage it in 2013 better!

4) learn to play chess – I’m not exactly losing hope on this one, but I would really rather knit than learn chess. Not adding it to the 2013 list, but if it comes up, I’m all over it.

5) make candles – This will totally happen in 2013

6) hand write & mail letters (76/52) – I nailed this one! Plan to do it again in 2013

7) learn some fashion history – I did hours of online research, poured over old Vogues from the library and read The Beautiful Fall on the recommendation of my girl Mutant Supermodel. So good!

8) watch these movies (14/100) – I totally abandoned this list in April when we moved down to LA, I have watched at least 50+ movies this year but not from that list! In 2013 I will just keep a list of what I have watched!

9) make (& use) a worm bin – We moved from our house before the ground thawed and into a garden apartment so no worm bin this year! I also don’t know if I care enough about it for it to make the 2013 list haha.

10) make soap – I did this with my friend Vanessa, her boyfriend Steve and my husband. It’s like magic! So fun too!!

11) knit this quit – I got halfway there!! It’s defo going on the 2013 list.
puff count = 202/400

12) knit 12 pairs of socks (14/12) – I rocked this challenge too! Doing it again in 2013!

There was a whole lot of baking going on around here this month but most of it was so pedestrian it wasn’t worth posting recipes of! I let the kids choose what we baked every time they asked to, so we ended up with A LOT of chocolate chip cookies and we did sugar cookies over and over and of course we made gingerbread maybe half a dozen times. They teamed up and decorated a gingerbread house together and there was much decking of halls and wrapping of gifts and watching of Christmas movies while I knitted on Christmas socks (as in, gift socks for Christmas, not Christmasy socks).

When I had a little time to steal, like say after they went to bed and before they got up, I tried out these recipes and they were all winners. Usually, I make batches and batches of cookies starting in mid-November so by Christmas I have a stockpile of 6 or 7 different kinds of cookies. Then I make assorted tins and bring them around to our friends and family as gifts. This year, I didn’t do that because while I had a handful of people that I could have brought assorted homemade treat tins to, it wasn’t enough for a the amount I end up with when I bake so many different kinds.

The funny thing is, the closer it got to Christmas, the more treat tin-worthy friends we were all making and by Christmas week, I easily could have given away as many as we would have had if I had just done my Christmas baking as usual. Oh well! Next year I will make lots!!

Here is the roundup of the four recipes I used this year.

	I made these one afternoon for a ‘bring a snack’ style mini potluck with some mommy friends at Silly Goose. They went over well with both kids and parents, which surprised me because I didn’t think the kids would be into it. (read)
	These were originally intended and baked up for my father and my dear friend’s brother. The kids always get to try new cookies even if the batch is destined for someone else – they liked these cookies so much they ate almost the entire first batch and once my husband discovered them, it was game over. I didn’t have enough left to send a decent package! Hilarious but nice to know when I have a winning recipe on my hands like this one. (read)
	This is not a recipe, it’s 5 things you have on hand mashed together and rolled into balls. Oh and you can drizzle them with chocolate but I was taking them to the park and they are not very mobile once they’re covered in chocolate. This is the kind of treat I’ll whip up before bed for the next afternoon when I know I’ll have no time but the kids will be asking for something. Be careful though, the part of you that is still 6 years old will want to eat as many as you can get your hands on and if you have a 6 year old, you’re going to want to keep a close watch on these babies. (read)
	I usually only do one cookie for Christmas that involves white chocolate, but this year I was so smitten with two recipes I went for it. This is the second of the two. I’ve never used maraschino cherries in a recipe before so it was a first and it totally worked out! Definitely drain the cherries well after you chop them, too much liquid will ruin the recipe and the cookies wont hold together as well. (read)

More little pieces of our Christmas, this time, kitchen edition.

-decorating a gingerbread house in your Hello Kitty pearls and Tink costume is a must (duh)
-making fondant from scratch and letting your kids attack gingerbread people with them makes for a seriously fun afternoon
-gingerbread houses can never have too many teeth breaking candies stuck to them
-pancakes taste better when they have seasonally appropriate shapes
-everyone loves festive treat boxes (I’m glad I haven’t met anyone who hates them, anyway)
-cakes should be baked in tree pans, painstakingly decorated with homemade buttercream and handed over to the little ones for dessert
-3 year olds are seriously into baking (another duh)

Super, super easy weeknight dinner (or super lazy weekend dinner 😉 ) that tastes like you worked a lot harder than you did. My favorite kind!

We have had a pretty laid back but still busy holiday season. It was different spending the holidays with just the 5 of us (and some wonderful local friends) but there were a lot of pluses to it. At the end of some nights, meals like this were all I was able to muster. Thankfully, my husband and the littles loved them. Phew!

3/4 cup breadcrumbs
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
4 chicken breasts, halved
salt & pepper to taste
1 large egg, beaten
2 cups pasta sauce (homemade or jarred)
1/4 cup olive oil
6 ounces mozzarella cheese

Heat oven to 400 (or broiler). Mix breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Dip chicken in beaten egg, then in crumb mixture, making sure it’s coated all over.

Pour the pasta sauce into the bottom of a baking dish. Heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the chicken breasts until golden (just a couple minutes each side). Then place the chicken on top of the pasta sauce.

Top each piece with mozzarella and bake for about 20 minutes or so. I always serve this with a plate of garlic penne because it goes so well with the pasta sauce, but really, you could use whatever side you like.

This is yet another of those recipes that I hesitate to call a recipe. All you’re really doing here is adding crushed candy canes to your already winning sugar cookie recipe and even better – these lazy little treats require no chilling / rolling / chilling / cutting. You just mix it up, add the candy canes, form into balls and sprinkle more candy bits on top.

There are so many different ways you can switch this up. Either to make a fancy platter of essentially the same cookie but not or as assembly line food gifts for neighbors! You can change the base of this basic sugar cookie by adding cocoa for a chocolate version, adding cinnamon and nutmeg for a spice cookie version, or you can tone down the peppermint flavor of the cookie by using vanilla extract instead. Whatever your little heart desires really, as long as it pairs up with the candy canes. Another way to mix it up would be to use different kinds of candy canes. I recently bought a box of Willy Wonka candy canes, they are purple, yellow, green, red and blue swirly and have a Gobstopper center! There are about eleventy billion different kinds out there, you could make this recipe different with each dozen by changing the candy canes.

If you don’t have a solid sugar cookie recipe, use this one! It’s my go-to for sugar cookie cutouts and I have posted it before.

Basic Sugar Cookies
1/2 cup + 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temp
3 cups + 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 cup superfine sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 tsp peppermint extract
plus whatever kind of candy canes you want to use

Cream together the butter, sugar and peppermint extract. DO NOT OVERMIX. Beat in the egg, add the sifted flour and mix on low till you have a sticky dough. Done! This is normally where the chilling / rolling / chilling / cutting happens but with these, you stir in about 4 or 5 crushed candy canes and form 1/2 tablespoon balls. Top with more crushed candy canes if you like, I found that made them look really festive and the kids loved them!

I absolutely hate broccoli. I know, I know. But I do. I usually make soup out of it and add either potato until it’s crazy creamy or I add cauliflower to mask the taste. Otherwise, I steam and puree it so I can add it to sauces and stews and still get a decent amount of it but I’m not about to just, eat a piece of broccoli. I hope one day I will, but I’m just not there. This recipe helped though! I can conceive of myself eating broccoli now!

I’ve seen recipes for broccoli gratin all over the place for years and years but it never really crossed my mind to try it – you know, on account of my hating broccoli. The kids love broccoli though and so does my husband and we all love cheese (it’s recipes like this that throw me off my vegan intentions – whoops) so I gave it a go. Holy moly. Super, super, crazy amazing good.

I had seconds happily (mostly because I wanted to eat the cheese sauce with a spoon), which I think is also how I learned that I’d eat broccoli if it was slathered in something delicious. Like this!

Cheesy Broccoli Gratin via Kitchen Comments

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
2 cups milk
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon thyme
8 oz cheddar cheese
24 oz broccoli
1/3 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat your oven to 400, then melt butter in a saucepan. Whisk in the flour and cook for about a minute. Add the milk and whisk till smooth, now add the nutmeg and thyme – and have your cheese and broccoli at the ready!
Remove your saucepan from the heat and stir in the cheese until it’s melted. Arrange the broccoli in a casserole dish (or whatever).
Just LOOK AT THIS. Ugh. It was so good.
Pour the cheese sauce over the broccoli. Slooooooowly to make sure it’s all coated.
Now toss the bread crumbs and Parm on top and bake for 20-30 minutes. Cool just enough to avoid burning your family/guests but serve it gooey!

I have wanted to make these little darlings since I first read about them last year! So cute! Since I was bringing mine to a park date with my favorite mommies ever, I skipped the chocolate and royal icing fire in the fireplace and opted to just decorate the mantle. They were a hit with everyone we shared them with because they were equally as tasty as they were adorable! True story!

I do try to avoid using food coloring when I can, though I admit that I always add it to my frostings. To me, it’s just one of those ‘time and a place for everything’ kind of things and I think the time for artificial food coloring is anytime you’re making royal or buttercream icing (though I will also say that I’d never use anything other than Wilton food color gels – if you’re going to do it, you may as well do it right). So in this case, I thought about using beet puree in place of the food coloring, but it would change the texture of the cookie completely and possibly make them unusable. So, food coloring it is!

Loads more cookies coming your way this month, pinky swear.

Red Velvet Fireplace Cookies – via Diamonds for Dessert

1 1/4 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, cubed
1 tablespoon food coloring
green, yellow and red gummy bear hands and feet (just cut the nubs off with kitchen scissors)

You don’t need me to tell you how to make these, but I will anyway. Ha! Just mix the flour, sugar, salt and cut in the butter with two knives. Usually, like with red velvet cake I strive for beet puree instead of red food coloring but it totally messes with the texture of the cookies. Just use let this be the day you throw food coloring caution to the side, k? Thanks!
Now roll out the dough to about 1/4″ thick, give or take a little and trim off the edges, then cut into 3″ x 2″ rectangles.
This part is a little tricky, so pop the dough in the fridge for freezer for a few minutes first. Then cut out a smallish square in the middle of the bottom of each rectangle to make a fireplace opening. I made some bigger than others to see how different they’d look after I decorated them! I baked them at 325 for about 15-20 minutes.
I had some extra dough so I rolled it out and cut out some candy canes!
Once they were cool, I dipped the tops in melted white chocolate and then piped melted green chocolate to hang like a string of lights! You could use royal icing, but they’d be a little more delicate that way. I dusted the entire cookie in sanding sugar and attached the gummy bear nubs to the still-wet green chocolate.
Super, super cute right?!

So as I mentioned about eleventy billion times last month, we took a road trip out to Las Vegas to celebrate our first American Thanksgiving with our dear friend Nichole and her four children! She is originally from the south and I am..well, I’m me, so we went all out. Our Vegas adventure was short and sweet. We drove out after dinner on Wenesday, checked into Circus Circus, did some late night wandering around the hotel and went to bed alarmingly late. Fun! We had an incredibly lazy Thanksgiving morning, much to Nichole’s dismay, but we did have a fantastic evening together once we finally got there!

The whole menu is pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun and there were 11 of us total. We had to leave all the leftovers with her (sorry!!), but there are 5 of them so that made sense anyway! She made a lovely turkey with stuffing and gravy, she and her wee ones also made the cranberry sauce, ham, pinto beans, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. I brought my very first sweet potato pie, apple crumble, cocoa brownies for the kids and my trio of tarts; lemon meringue, pumpkin and Sailor Jerry pecan (and of course my cherry apron and matching headband – essential items).

I’m linking to three recipes I just put up on the site from that day. They are all equally bananas-amazing.

	Lemon meringue has been one of my husband’s favorite pies since we met so I have a lot of practice with this, and I’ve tried a few different recipes over the years but this has been the absolute best one. (read)
	These are another piece of the trifecta of awesome that was my tart collection at our first American Thanksgiving. Half a dozen are made without any run and the other half are spiked with Sailor Jerry. (read)
	It sounds typical to say I’m from Canada and I’ve never had sweet potato pie, but I think it’s just all in who you know and my exposure to Southern Belles up to this point has been pretty limited. However, I spent Thanksgiving this year with a real life Southern Gal, and she put me in charge of the sweet potato pie – she even gave me her Granny’s recipe. (read)

On Friday, we picked three of the zillion things there are to do in Vegas with kids and each of them was a hit.

First we just went downstairs to The Adventuredome in Circus Circus. As the name implies, it’s an indoor amusement park, and it’s way bigger than this Canuk remembered from my own childhood! Like, woah. We wanted to get to make sure we got to do all three things before we headed home so we let the kids each pick a couple of rides and away we went! Please note there are very few actual horses on the carousel. Wee One #2 picked the dragon and Wee One #3 picked the flying bunny. There were also flying bears and pigs. I honestly thought that was pretty rad.

We are all a little in love with Vegas and we’re all eager to go back again. This was our first road trip since we moved to LA and I have to be honest, it feels pretty amazing to come home to California. Like, taking a vacation from vacation!

Our next stop was The Silverton to check out the aquarium and the mermaid that was rumored to hang out there. While we waited for her to make her entrance, we saw a leopard print sting ray. What?? We spent some time this summer with Wee One #3’s Godmother, exploring the aquarium in Long Beach and we got to see a lot of sting rays but I had no idea that leopard print sting rays existed! So cool!
The chocolate factory was a must do because every year for years and years and years, going back before I can remember and ending when my granny started getting ‘the old’, my aunt went to Vegas every year with either her girlfriends or her sister in laws or nieces or all of the above. Every single time she came back, she’d bring us Ethel M chocolates. It only felt fitting for us to hit the chocolate factory and pick her up a box of Ethel M chocolate. The kids thought it was pretty cool to see where M&Ms come from, though I’m sure this is not the only place they are made!
	This picture is hilarious to me and really sums up where they are right now. Wee Ones #2 & 3 are crazy and hyper and delightfully insane. Wee One #1? Well, he’s 12 now so he’s not about to get into shenanigans with them ON CAMERA, but trust me, he is just as delightfully insane as they are. 😉