Fresh Orange Juice

Mom, Helena, Benedick, and me went to Grammy's house awhile back, and while we were there we picked a whole bunch of oranges off her trees. We juiced a lot of them today.

Doesn't it look delicious?

Christmas Cookies

Our other Christmasy day-before-Thanksgiving activity was baking cookies.

We made three kinds: sugar cookies (with no frosting), peanut butter cookies (with peanut butter cups), and ginger thins. We listened to Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CDs while we were working, which was fun.

The sugar cookies were "Sugar Drop Cookies with Oil", from Joy of Cooking.

Lots of ingredients.

Putting dry ingredients in the sifter...it looks like a snowy mountain.

It looks like snow after you put it in the sifter too.
You can see it falling!

You make little balls of dough and roll them in a bowl of sugar.
This is a good time to take a lot of tastes of the dough.

Benedick washed the cookie sheets as we emptied them.

Finished sugar cookies! Don't they look good?

We got the recipe for the peanut butter cookies from a recipe Mom got from a friend a while back.

Making the peanut butter cookies.

The dough in the fridge next to our Thanksgiving turkey.

Peanut butter cups ready to go on the cookies.

Finished peanut butter cookies!

The last cookies were Helena's specialty: Ginger Thins from Joy of Cooking. Helena always says she will never make them again, because they are so much work, but Mara talked her into it.

Helena making the ginger thins.

The finished ginger thins!

We're going to send some of the cookies to friends away at college, but we definitely get some for ourselves too. I wish all of you were here to help taste them too!

Rainbows and Rice Pudding

We saw this really pretty rainbow last Thursday. It was so big Mom couldn't take a picture of the whole thing, but we still got a really nice picture.

I also made rice pudding all by myself yesterday. It was so good that this is what it looked like 10 minutes after it came out of the oven.

Onion Pie

We made this yummy onion pie recipe (from Joy of Cooking) with meatloaf for dinner yesterday. Here is the recipe and a bunch of pictures.

Onion Pie Recipe
Preheat oven to 450. Line a 9-inch pie pan with pie crust dough (my sister has a favorite pie crust recipe that I will post sometime), prick and chill it. Skin and slice thinly 2 1/2 lb. onions or leeks. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a heavy saucepan, add the onions. Stir and cook them over low heat until they are translucent. Cool them well. Combine and heat slowly until blended: 3 eggs, 1 cup cultured sour cream, 1 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. freshly ground pepper, optional add herbs and/or spices as desired. Stir this mixture into the onions. Brush the bottom of the chilled pie shell with 1 slightly beaten egg white. Fill it with the slightly cooled onion mixture. (The recipe says you can put bacon or sausage on top, but we didn't do that because we were having it with meatloaf.) Bake the pie in a 450 oven 10 min. Then reduce heat to 300 and bake until the crust is light brown, about 1/2 hour.

Mara patting out the pie crust.

Pie crust dough is delicious!

Katarina sautéing onions

A very yummy dinner.