Awww, combo of awesome DW and preggo hormones is a killer.

Merry, merry, Bitches! May the joys of the season bring you love and peace.

Presents have been exchanged (and some will require exchanging, as seems always inevitable) and everyone is in a food coma from a wonderful brunch my daughter prepared: biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, BBQ meatballs, and my contribution of fruit salad. My sister-in-law and I brought a ton of cookies and there is no way six people are going to eat even a quarter of them. But that means we have lots of snacks to go with the egg nog. Plus, being my family, two different sparkling wines, Irish whiskey, a couple of red wines and beer.

Not a present, as such, but my sister-in-law brought a portable photo scanner with her and she's been taking our photo albums and loose photos to scan. It's really nice to know all those old (1910 and 20s old) photos will be preserved and maybe now I can sign up for ancestry.com again for a month or so to upload them to attach to various family members.

Cheese & crackers & pickles are served. Nibbles while watching a rather boring Agatha Christie movie. 3 hour movie. Oy.

Please give C, J, and M my best, amyth. I hope Leifur isn't being too demanding. Thanks so much for cat sitting!

I've been watching my sister's cat getting high on catnip today. Pity Leifur's not into it.

We're going through my grandmother's recipe binders, to much hilarity. Four tomato aspic recipes and counting. My brother: "Sounds like a congealed Bloody Mary."

I DAMN THEE, ASPIC!

Make that seven. Some repeats. Other highlights: lime jello salad with bleu cheese and horse radish, spaghetti pie, eggplant pudding cake (grated eggplant, vanilla pudding mix, cake mix), and some tastier things. I snagged my great-grandmother's gumbo recipe.

Also, she apparently once read that 1/4 tsp ginger could be added to beans to reduce flatulence, and it's a recurring theme in many recipes. Apparently this grandma was always kind of gassy.

Mmm, marshmallows rolled in baked sweet potatoes mixed with cornflakes, and then baked again.

lime jello salad with bleu cheese

HMOG.

I have to admit I've always wanted to try jellied chicken salad. Just to see what it was like.

I have a slight problem buying cookbooks especially when I can go to the library sale and get a bag of books for $3 (I got 8 books last time!). One of my latest acquisitions has a recipe for something called a Bacon Big Boy. Which is a french roll split with 2 hot dogs and 2 slices of cheese inside, and then wrapped in bacon slices and broiled until the bacon is cooked. It serves 1.

It just reminds me that calorie bomb recipes are not new.

And when I was in Maine I picked up 2 cookbooks from the time of WWII, one specifically for dealing with rationing. They both were geared towards introducing women to "old fashioned" cooking when "convenience foods" weren't available. Things like rediscovering how to make soups from scratch instead of relying on cans, and how beneficial and cost effective gardens are.

The wording kind of reminded of some more recent cookbooks and the idea of farm to table or planting your own garden to save money and get fresher foods.

TCG and I finally exchanged our presents tonight, and BBCA is working again so all is good in my world.