Snowballs are full of ground pecans, covered in powdered sugar (and they are my husband’s favorite cookie).

This year, I was thinking about making Christmas cookies with my little chefs and thought:

“couldn’t we stack the snowballs and make little snowmen?”

Yes we can.

They may not look perfect, but they are incrediably easy to make, the kids had a blast, nothing raw in the ingredients - so they can even eat the batter, and they baked up just fine.

To make into snowmen, we used two snowballs, the top one smaller that the bottom. We decorated with Chocolate Chips, M&M’s and even Nerds. Once they were done - we had a “snow storm” and covered them with sugar.

Here is the snowball cookie recipe:

Snowballs

1 Cup Butter
1/4 cup White Sugar
2 cups Ground Pecans
2 cups Flour
Confectioner’s Sugar

Directions:

Cream the butter. Add in the sugar and pecans, mix well. Slowly add in the flour until combined. Shape into balls (about 1 tbs).

Bake at 300 degrees on ungreased cookie sheet for 45 minutes. Roll in confectioner’s sugar. Let cool. Roll again.

INGREDIENTS
* 1.5 Quarts Chicken Stock
* 3 cups Apple Juice or Cider
* 1 cup kosher salt
* 3 sprigs fresh sage
* 1 tablespoon dried rosemary
* 3 sprigs fresh thyme
* 1/4 cup peppercorns
* Juice and rind of 1 lemon
* 1 gallon ice water

DIRECTIONS
1. In a large stock pot, combine all ingredients except the water and bring to a boil, stirring frequently to be sure salt is dissolved. Remove from heat, and let cool to room temperature.

2. When the brine mixture is cool, pour it into your brining container (brining bag; huge pot; sanitized 5 gallon bucket etc). Stir in the ice water.

3. Wash and dry your turkey (giblets removed). Place the turkey, breast down, into brine. Place in the refrigerator overnight (or outside in a cooler covered and ice if it is chilly where you live).

4. Remove the turkey, draining off the excess brine and *pat dry* (very important for crisp skin later). Discard excess brine.

5. Cook the turkey as desired reserving the drippings for gravy. Brined turkeys seem to cook a bit faster so mind your meat thermometer.

One year I went to spend the winter holidays with them, and it was during this trip that Marilee taught me this recipe for “Pumpkin Logs”. I easily helped her make 20-25 logs, wrapped them in red and green Saran wrap and ribbon and gave them out to everyone. This is another one of her lessons that stuck with me my whole life.

As I got older, I found out that her recipe is the very same Libby’s Pumpkin Roll recipe that you can find on the cans of most Libby’s pumpkin cans. Oh well, it is SO yummy, I hope you make this and enjoy a TO-DIE-FOR pumpkin sweet and share the recipe with someone you love. If you have any recommendations on how to make this even better - please comment and let me know!

Estimated Times:
Preparation - 45 min | Cooking - 13 min | Cooling Time - 1 hrs refrigerating | Yields - 10

Ingredients:

CAKE
* 1/4 cup powdered sugar (to sprinkle on towel)
* 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 3 large eggs
* 1 cup granulated sugar
* 2/3 cup LIBBY’S® 100% Pure Pumpkin
* 1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)

FILLING
* 1 pkg. (8 oz.) cream cheese, at room temperature
* 1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
* 6 tablespoons butter or margarine, softened
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* Powdered sugar (optional for decoration)

Directions:
FOR CAKE:
PREHEAT oven to 375° F. Grease 15 x 10-inch jelly-roll pan; line with wax paper. Grease and flour paper. Sprinkle a thin, cotton kitchen towel with powdered sugar.

COMBINE flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves and salt in small bowl. Beat eggs and granulated sugar in large mixer bowl until thick. Beat in pumpkin. Stir in flour mixture. Spread evenly into prepared pan. Sprinkle with nuts.

BAKE for 13 to 15 minutes or until top of cake springs back when touched. (If using a dark-colored pan, begin checking for doneness at 11 minutes.) Immediately loosen and turn cake onto prepared towel. Carefully peel off paper. Roll up cake and towel together, starting with narrow end. Cool on wire rack.

FOR FILLING:
BEAT cream cheese, 1 cup powdered sugar, butter and vanilla extract in small mixer bowl until smooth. Carefully unroll cake. Spread cream cheese mixture over cake. Reroll cake. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least one hour. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving, if desired.

COOKING TIP (listen to this!!):
Be sure to put enough powdered sugar on the towel when rolling up the cake so it will not stick.

Ingredients:
3-4 tbs Olive Oil
2 Garlic Gloves, minced
1/2 medium Onion, small slices
3 Roma Tomatoes, cut into large chunks
2 fillets of Mahi-Mahi
1/2 cup cooking wine or beer
2 tbs butter
Salt/Pepper
Red Pepper Flakes
Cumin
1/4 cup fresh basil, rough chopped
1 lime

Medium/Hot Fresh Salsa (to your taste)
1 Avocado, sliced
Flour Burrito Tortillas
Shredded Cheddar Cheese, sharp

Directions
Add Olive Oil to a large saute pan on medium heat. Add minced garlic and short slices of onion. Season to taste with Salt/Pepper, 2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp red pepper flakes. Add the tomatoes and basil and saute for about 5-6 minutes until the tomatoes begin to release their water. Turn the heat up to medium high and add cooking wine/beer, let liquid reduce about 2 minutes. Turn heat to medium-low and simmer another 5-7 minutes.

Dust both sides of the fish with Cumin, salt/pepper. Make room in the pan for the fish. Turn heat up to medium and add butter. When melted, add the fish. Cook each side about 2-3 minutes until the fish falls apart. Take the pan off the heat, squeeze fresh lime juice from 1 lime over the fish and other pan contents. Pull the fish apart in the pan and mix well with all of the cooked veggies. Remove from pan and put into a bowl for serving.

Warm the tortillas (I prefer them warmed in the oven), add the fish mixture, cheese, salsa and avocado slices. Roll and enjoy.

There are a ton of additional ingredients or variations. Add sour cream (or strained Greek yogurt); use creme fresh or other Mexican cheeses, add rice, pinto or black beans, use cilantro instead of basil (although it was quite good) etc…have fun. My ingredients are just what I happened to have in my fridge tonight!

It contains a great list of age-appropriate cooking skills that children can do AND it is written by a saint (e.g., she teaches children’s cooking classes).

I have my little chefs in the kitchen with me all the time and try to find ways to allow them to help. Her list is great, and it made me think of some additional tasks that I haven’t included my kids in on - like picking the ingredients so that they can begin developing the ability to put recipes together.

This week my little 3 (almost 4) year old was able to help me cook Beef Stroganoff for daddy’s birthday dinner by slicing the mushrooms using a pastry scraper. For my little chefs - it is ALL about the vegetable slicing.

I need to look into this to see if any one teaches Mommy and me cooking classes in the local West Palm Beach area…or maybe I should start one!!

Hmmm…need a bigger kitchen.

I love to cook and take great pleasure in amazing my friends and family with meals that I whip up. I am the oldest child in a pretty large family and grew up with my mom always cooking. My mom was by no means a gourmet cook, but I think that I learned how to make the most of what is in the cubberts from her. Also, being in the restaurant business, she worked most holidays and I would often be the one stuffing and watching over the Turkey - but my passion really started in college and just grew. By some miracle, the cooking love is coded in my DNA and was passed down to my beautiful little girl. Now we cook together religiously.

I am always the hostess

95% of all holiday/birthday/family gathering meals are at my house. I can spend a few hours putting a meal together and then not be hungry at the end. Seeing everyone’s faces when they taste the food is what I am really waiting for. It is sorta like the episode of Friends, The One With Rachel’s Crush, where after 2 days of cleaning and redecorating the apartment, Monica falls asleep as everyone comes over to visit:

(They all go over to her apartment.)

Ross: Oh my God!

Rachel: Wow! Monica!

Phoebe: Great! Ross:

This is beautiful!

(She has cleaned it, completely redecorated it, removed the carpet, and polished the floor.)

Phoebe: Oh did you—what did you—did you work for two days straight?

Monica: Pretty much. (to Joey) So, what do you, what do you think of the floor?

Joey: I don’t know, it looks the same.

Monica: You used to have carpet.

Joey: Oh yeah!

Monica: So I made snacks. Please, just hang out okay? I’m just gonna rest my eyes just a little bit.

Ross: Look, Mon, do you want us to uh, come back later?

Monica: Oh no-no-no, stay, stay, stay, just keep talking. I’m always the hostess.

Hope you enjoy my site. This should be fun - watch and give me pointers as I go.

Harriet Van Horne

Part of what makes my cooking Seeryously Gude is the emotion that I pour into the food while I am making it. I literally put my heart into the meal. I believe that a meal is more than just the sum of its parts. I can write down a recipe or tell my husband how to make something if I am just too tired or traveling on business, but there is just something more subtle to making an excellent meal, and the nuances can not be conveyed via a recipe.

Maybe it just comes down to energy, but when I cook for my family and friends, the emotion that I feel in providing an amazing meal that I know they are going to love literally gets incorporated into my cooking. It is transcendental. It is something that I have a hard time replicating if I’ve had particularly bad day and my food result is clearly uninspired. But, when I decide that I want to make something amazing, it doesn’t matter how common the ingredients, the meal will come out truly special. I seek to convey my passion through my food and when I’ve gotten it right, it is amazing (even though most end up quite full at the end and the longing for nap replaces any feelings of passion that the meal may have conjured).

Is it just me or is this a common feeling among those that love to cook? I decided to search for “transcendental cooking” and found that and it is somewhat of a THING. Darn it, wouldn’t you know that the URL FoodWitch.com is already taken!

The movie Like Water For Chocolate or Simply Irresistible would be examples of transcendental cooking and conveying emotion through food. In my search, I found a wonderful post, The Transcendental Qualities of Cooking, by a woman named Kit Pollard, that explains another side, an aspirational philosophy of cooking, that is very true for me as well (but she explains it more eloquently).

I feel that my journey into food is just starting. I am compelled to learn as much as I can about food and cooking; this passion of mine is awakening in a way that was not there before. It is almost as if I have spent my time until now learning and preparing for this next phase where I am going to truly dive into the art of food and see where it takes me.

I think that I have had Fibromyalgia (FM) since I was a young girl. Often, I get terrible pains in my legs, I become overly sensitive to sound, light touch, and fluorescent lighting, and the last way I would ever describe myself is as a morning person, because I never feel truly rested.  Admittedly, I am a baby about pain, but the pains in my legs were often so bad that as a girl that I would cry with heating pads wrapped around my legs.  While I have done a great job of being completely high functioning by most people’s standards, this over-sensitivity and leg/back pain has been happening to me for about as long as I can remember.  In the beginning we wrote it off as growing pains, and I was also a dancer - so having aches and pains from hours of ballet wasn’t exactly unexpected.

When I was about 11, maybe younger, I will have to ask my mom, she took me to see an Orthopaedic Surgeon who performed an exam that included him pushing on certain spots all over my body. I specifically remember him pushing along my lower back, neck, and inside my knees and pain SHOT through my body. His diagnosis - Fibromyalgia. I now know that those spots have the hyper-technical name, tender points.  The doc wrote me a prescription for Naproxen Sodium (aka horse pill versions of Aleve) to help with the pain, and off I went. 

Living with FM is hard on me and my family at times.  I know that I am not the nicest person to be around when I am experiencing the intense frustration of being over-stimulated by normal everyday life expereinces (e.g., listening to music that happens to have a certain repetitive beat, the incessant barking of my jack russells, grocery shopping, or being around my kids when they are jawing non-stop and running around the house, it can be unbearable).  The fluorescent lights of Wal-mart and someone chomping on food next to me are particularly powerful irritants.

I decided to write about dealing with FM for a couple of reasons.  One, because I have never really talked about it and I want to share with anyone that might be having a similar experience (if you’ve got any helpful coping mechanisms or recipes that make it all better - send ‘em over), and two, because the increasing frequency of my irritability and over-sensitivity has become really apparent to me as I started doing my cooking shows with the kids.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore sharing my love of cooking with my little chefs - but making videos of us cooking made it painfully obvious to me just how little patience I seem to have with them these days.  Writing it down is helping me to admit that there is an actual syndrome that I am dealing with, and that fact allows me to be a little less hard on myself.

For as hard as it is for me, I am sure living with a mommy and wife that is often irritated and over-stimulated is not fun for my little family, and that breaks my heart.  I am saying this to myself almost like a mantra as my son sits next to me and happily chomps on popcorn while tapping his toy ninja turtle on my lap desk.  He has no idea that this is making mommy feel like I could jump out of my skin. 

I have never seen another doctor to talk about FM and it is mainly something that I just deal with.  I know from research that the cause is relatively unknown and some still even dispute its existence.  My pain and irritation comes and goes.  Some days are just better than others.  I am interested in some of the newer medications that I keep hearing about on commercials - but concerned about having to live a medicated life.

I love this family and I hope that I am not too hard to deal with.  But at least I’m cute, somewhat successful, and I make them some DAMN GOOD MEALS.  Now that’s what I’m talking about