7 Tips for Making Your Christmas Cookie Party Merry: A Stop on the Meet the Family Blog Hop

 Christmas, Cooking, Holidays  10 Responses »
Dec 102012
 

The reason I host Christmas cookie decorating parties is that baking is an imprecise science (at least in my kitchen), and, occasionally, you need someone to take the fall. I also am not a fan of the cookie exchange parties, where everyone brings a container of cookies, tosses them on the table, and mixes and matches. There is always some anti-Julia Child who believes ripping open a bag of Oreos passes as holiday baking. At my parties, you earn the cookies you take home at the end of the night clasped in your sticky fingers.

Of course, any sugar-laden event can go awry. That’s why I offer these helpful tips to keep your holidays merry:

1. Provide regular food to offset the sugar high. Since my Christmas cookie decorators work hard and justifiably deserve nourishment, I tend to look the other way as they snarf down the product. To help them adjust their sugar levels, I always have real food to munch on throughout the evening. My two standards are cheese fondue, which makes me feel tres continental, and barbeque sandwiches from Scott Ja-Mama’s, a famed hole-in-the-wall joint for pulled pork in South Minneapolis.

2. Invite everyone to participate, but don’t expect everyone to do so. I have discovered that guys often have trouble getting in touch with their inner cookie-decorating child. You may have to lasso your husbands and boyfriends with your Wonder Woman lariat and drag them to the decorating table. Their style can best be described as minimalist. One gentleman, who is greatly interested in politics, decorated his snowflake simply with “Obama 2008.” I saved that cookie, wrapped it up, and sent it to him on President Obama’s inauguration day.

3. Make extra red frosting. This goes back to the likelihood of mishaps in the kitchen. You may be shocked to know that not all of your cookies will come out of the oven in pristine condition. Reindeer legs can be snapped off; snowflakes can lose arms; whole cookie families can suffer decapitation. It can be a precarious journey from baking sheet to kitchen counter. Yet, you never want to waste a cookie. So what do you do? You swipe red frosting on the injured area and tell the sad story of how Rudolph met up with a chainsaw or wood chipper (for Fargo fans), or how the cookie family was in a terrible auto accident.

4. Buy oodles of decorating embellishments. Silver balls, miniature snowflakes, cinnamon buttons, sprinkles, you will need them all as a well-supplied patron of the arts.

5. Decorate with themes. How about: best Gingerbread Elvis, best bikini-clad reindeer (we do live in Minnesota with dreams of a February Caribbean vacation), or best Jackson Pollock star?

6. Stay cool. Inevitably, someone will decorate an anatomically correct cookie person. You can react, or you can ignore it and hit the punch bowl. If there are young children decorating with you, make the offender eat the cookie immediately after getting his or her jollies.

7. Lay on the llamas. It is my position that cookie decorating should be more about fun with frosting and friends than the pursuit of the perfectly frosted cookie. That’s why I do not just bake Christmas-themed cookies. I collect other cookie cutters, and one of my most popular is the llama. Everyone loves decorating the llamas.

So, for a great Christmas cookie party, don’t forget the llamas, keep the sugar flowing, and have plenty of milk (and wine) on hand.

Happy holidays and may all your cookies avoid the wood chipper.

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What do you like to bake for the holidays and why? Leave a comment and share it with us.

For a short story in the tradition of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, check out “Christmas Unplugged.” And have a happy and well-lit holiday.

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This post is part of the Meet the Family Blog Hop. We all have festive traditions, memories, stories, recipes, hopes, and wishes that we share within our families. This hop is all about celebrating family and festivities, both in real life and in fiction! The host of this blog hop is Terri Giuliano Long.

Several writers are blogging about their holiday memories and experiences. Get in the holiday spirit! We will be blogging from December 10-13. Stop by our sites. You’ll find the entire list here. Please take a moment to read a few posts and comment. We love hearing from you. Have a fabulous holiday.



Everyday Creativity Can Keep You Healthy

 Art, Cooking, Creativity, Maud's House, Writing  No Responses »
Jun 282012
 

A creative idea a day keeps the doctor away. And it doesn’t even have to be a big idea. We don’t have to be the next Michelangelo or be a whiz at creating things with pipe cleaners. We just have to practice what psychology professor Ruth Richards calls “everyday creativity.”

Richards, one of the researchers at Harvard Medical School, says expressive writing has been shown to improve immune system functioning, for example, and older people who think more innovatively tend to cope better with aging and illness. In an article in Psychology Today, she maintains that engaging in creative behaviors makes us more dynamic, conscious, nondefensive, observant, collaborative, and brave.

Creativity “makes you more resilient, more vividly in the moment, and, at the same time, more connected to the world,” Richards says.

What is everyday creativity anyway? And what are some everyday things you can do to enhance your creativity and get some of those healthy benefits?

Everyday creativity, as defined by Richards, is simply an expression of originality and meaningfulness. It could be something as simple as wearing blue eye shadow when you always wear gray or taking a different route to work just for the heck of it. If these things suddenly put a smile on your face, give you a lift, and open your spirit a little wider to the world around you, you just tapped your everyday creativity. Here are some more ideas:

  • Try a new recipe. I am always amazed to hear Lynne Rossetto Kasper of The Splendid Table on public radio take three disparate ingredients and come up with a whole new dish—and it’s not because boiling water is a challenge for me.
  • Discover the joy of writing morning pages. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, encourages writers and nonwriters alike to start the day filling three pages of a notebook with their worries, joys, dreams, and thoughts. The idea is that once you take out the garbage, there is a ton of room for creativity. Who knows what you’ll think of?
  • Take a field trip. Go some place you’ve never been or do something you’ve never done. I personally find museums inspiring and calming, but I love to explore the unknown. I was at a Minnesota Twins baseball game recently and Rubbertoes (my husband) offered to arrange for me to run the bases. I’ve never stood on a major league baseball field before. If it hadn’t been 95 degrees and I hadn’t been frustrated with the team’s poor showing, I would have done it.
  • Turn your day upside down. That’s when you eat breakfast for dinner. I still get this feeling I’m pulling something over on someone when I have pancakes for supper. And if the pancakes are chocolate chip, I’m practically beaming. But this tip doesn’t have to be about food. Try looking at something one way and then flipping it around and looking at it another way. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Henry David Thoreau, who was in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that supported slavery, Emerson said, “Henry, how did you come to be here?” Thoreau replied, “Ralph, how did you come to be out there?” Challenge your perceptions and energize your creativity.
Lost and found creativity is the topic of my novel Maud’s House. It has a postmistress who writes poetry, a minister who plays the sax, a dairy farmer who tap dances, and a sheriff who builds birdhouses modeled after historic residences. So what happens when the whole town loses its creativity? To celebrate creativity, I am giving away eBooks of Maud’s House from June 28-30. Go to Amazon and get one. Leave a review or comment here.

Cupcakes 24/7 and the Jetsons

 Cooking  2 Responses »
Mar 192012
 

I fantasize about cooking like the Jetsons do: with the press of a button.

I love to eat but hate to cook, which is a sad situation to be in three times a day. Nothing about the kitchen calls to me—except for occasional baking binges involving cookie cutters and multicolored frosting. In fact, I once remodeled a perfectly good kitchen into a library with a stove.

Perhaps that is why I am intrigued by the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM. Behind its pink doors are freshly baked cupcakes in a variety of flavors courtesy of Sprinkles Cupcakes. Select your flavor de jour, slip in your credit card, and a robotic arm goes to work retrieving your personal box of bakery bliss. The door slides open and voilà. Munchies satisfied—George Jetson style—any time of the day or night.

The cupcake automat also taps some vein of guilt in me. For each passing year, I sneak farther and farther away from my primal beginnings as chief cook and bottle washer. How did I get like this? I come from women who were fearless in the kitchen. My mother, a self-taught cook, loved to experiment with recipes. My grandmother twisted the heads off chickens, for God’s sake.

I rose from a stew of women’s lib, the invention of the microwave, and the proliferation of preservatives—a woman with no burning desire to separate poultry from its head.

Somewhere along the line, without really meaning to, I abdicated the kitchen. Maybe it started when my partner, Rubbertoes, began preparing the occasional meal. Maybe it was when I insisted that my children make their own school lunches. (I reasoned that if I had to shop for it, they could at least toss it in a lunch bag.)

My mother-in-law used to say one of the things she admired about me was my talent for abdication when it came to cooking. This was not possible for a woman of her generation raising seven children in the fifties.

Once she came over for dinner and teased my four-year-old daughter that it was “her turn to cook tonight.”

My daughter replied, “But, Grandma, I can’t drive.”

I think of the cupcake ATM and wonder: if I owned such technology, what would I want my own personal automat to do? Put chocolate chips in my pancakes. Make sure there was always a fresh salad tossed and ready to eat. Peel my oranges in the morning. Know about a million things to do with potatoes. Bake bread, of course. And I haven’t even thought about the drink menu.

I am not alone in my automat envy. I know other women who, like me, get bored just warming up leftovers, who would rather read than cook, and who are thankful to have men in their lives who make a mean chocolate chip pancake.

It has become obvious to me that to cook well one must care. And it has taken me many years to be able to admit that I don’t care about cooking.

I wonder if Judy Jetson ever felt this way, if she stubbornly crossed her arms, and insisted that George press that button on the food processor. If he did, his lobster thermidor probably came out alive and pinching his nose. Those are the kinds of things that happen to George.

I understand. That is the way I cook, too—everything comes out like a sit-com—so it is better that I not try at all. Besides I’m in the middle of this great book.

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Give me a shout: What would you like to have in your own personal automat? Or has one of your meals ever turned out like a situation comedy?

Bet Hemingway Was a Whiz in the Kitchen

 Cooking, Writing  2 Responses »
Jan 092012
 

The last cake I baked drifted out of the pan as if it were an angel descending, settled on the platter, and promptly split down the middle. The fissure was about the size of the Grand Canyon. Since it was a birthday cake and, thus, not expendable, I made repairs. It takes a lot of frosting to fill the Grand Canyon.

I am used to such misadventures; they do not faze me. My husband says these things would not happen if: 1) I read more in the kitchen (as in Julia Child or Betty Crocker), or 2) I didn’t read as much (as in Hemingway or Steinbeck).

But why should I read cookbooks when I am such a marvelous cook to begin with?

I can boil down sentences until there is only the essence left, the true flavor of the words. They cling delicately to the bone of meaning and taste full and round in the mouth. They form such vivid images you can almost bite into them and feel their juices running down your chin.

A good story takes some preparation. Call it marinating. True, there are a few storytellers, such as Garrison Keillor, who pop out stories like microwave ovens. But I, and probably most other writers, take a while to collect information and ideas. After I gather the ingredients, I throw them into a pan, cover them with sauce from the subconscious, and wait.

Sometimes, I wait for years. Good cooking cannot be rushed.

Even after I have made the story, I must wait, let it simmer, let it age. For a story made today has a different taste tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Good writing, work studied and hailed and read over and over again, never loses its taste, never goes sour.

Of course, errors do happen. I forget to add a thought. Or I beat an idea instead of folding it in with gentleness and patience. Or I sprinkle in too many adjectives, and the story becomes not only runny but run on.

The best cooks never follow the book as if it were a drill sergeant. They improvise, feeling their way by taste and touch and sound. With practice, you get to know what will work; you have a sense of what the story needs, when it is missing a pinch of this or a dash of that.

And, of course, I have burned things. Everyone does. Cooks on scaffolds building skyscrapers, cooks in operating rooms navigating jungles of tiny veins. Cooks speaking before juries, exploring the ocean deep, patrolling lonely city streets. They make mistakes, but they don’t give up. They go right back and beat that steel beam again, cut out that diseased organ, flambé their opponents’ arguments.

Nothing is more disheartening than to hear someone cry: “I can’t cook.” Nonsense, everyone can cook. We all have our specialties, and none is greater or less than others. We all have some dish inside us with our name on it. Sometimes, we just forget to look for it. We let people sidetrack us. Categorize us. We don’t listen to our hearts.

I say get out your pots and pans and descend into the Grand Canyon. I hear the view is stunning.