Mother-Daughter Bonding

So I had a rather busy weekend. Just to clarify, my weekend is Monday through Wednesday. I work four 10 hours shifts Thursday through Sunday nights. It's weird and sometimes it's a real pain in the butt, but it definitely has its advantages. Anyway, I spent a good chunk of my weekend cleaning our house because it needed it and another good chunk of my weekend with my mom.

Back when I was a tot, we would occasionally spend days doing stuff like baking cookies. Making our own Christmas ornaments, making white chocolate covered pretzels, etc. That was one of the reasons I love Christmas so much. So I decided we should do it again this year since it's been a while. So mom came over and that's exactly what we did. I lit a fire in our fireplace and we went to work in the kitchen.

This is one of the ornaments my mom and I made ourselves. Lots of felt, fabric, and iron-on glue thingies.

We made No-Bake cookies, which unfortunately, didn't work out too well. Apparently my peanut butter sucks. They were of a mushier texture than one really wants their cookies to be. They taste fine though. Then we made Summer Sausage. You know all those gift baskets and stuff with meat and cheeses and such. 99% of those include Summer Sausage, and guess what. You can make it on your own for a heck of a lot less money. People also seem to find it mildly impressive. Not many people make their own sausage. I will include the recipe at the end of the post.

At some point we also made Cinnamon Roasted Almonds where my mom used more nuts than it called for and about twice the amount of egg white the recipe called for. That's how we roll though. More on that later. They still ended up being pretty decent.

Next we made the Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies. The recipe called for bourbon which I thought we had. We have Crown Royal and Jack Daniels. My mother then informed me that neither of these are bourbon. They're whiskey. I insisted there wouldn't be a difference, but I rarely ever drink alcohol and she assured me it would be a big difference. So we used Spiced Rum instead. We totally go by the book on recipes. :)  I also made a fairly significant mess during this process because I had the mixer going too fast as I added the flour. It went all over the place. It looked something kind of like this:

Except instead of a mom and a 2 year old and 5 year old making the mess it was a mom and a 26 year old. Tiny differences. The cookies turned out pretty good though. The texture was a smidge chewier than the usual cookie, but it was yummy. Then we went to see Tangled and it was awesome...again.

So yeah, good times. I thought I'd share a couple pictures of our Christmasified home.

I got this Christmas tree for $20. It was one of the displays at Target and the manager let me have it for 75% off since I worked there. Good thing because I was way broke back then.

This is a dancing Santa that my mom and I got for my Grandma Grace right before she passed away. He shakes his butt while singing "Are y'all ready for this?"

This is Jack. He really likes hanging out under the Tree.

And this is our fireplace. When we moved in back in July, one of the first things I said was "Yay! I have a mantle to hang Christmas stockings from!"

And now for the Summer Sausage recipe:

Beef Summer Sausage

2 lbs ground beef or chuck   
1 1/2 tsp liquid smoke
2 Tbs Tender Quick curing salt
1/4  tsp garlic powder
2 tsp pepper
1 TBS cracked pepper corns
1 tsp mustard seed
1/4 cup water

Mix salt and spices into water
work into the meat
Shape into 4 logs
Refrigerate 24 hours uncovered then
Bake at 350 for 1 hour