Resolution Buster #1 - Twice Baked Potatoes

Nothing like not blogging in weeks and then swooping in with something random like a post about twice baked potatoes! I haven't posted about Christmas, our wonderful post-Christmas trip to visit my family in CT and the almost 40-hour round trip road trip that entailed; the exhilarating trip into New York City the day before New Year's Eve ("New Year's Eve Eve"); the christening of my precious baby niece, Emma, our detour to Charlottesville, VA {my personal happy place} on the way home; or the most well-timed vomit incident in the history of the world (hint: Elizabeth on our driveway after pulling in at the end of a 16 hour drive. Thatta girl!). Nope, I got slammed at work the moment we got back from CT and have pretty much just been limping through the month. But enough about all that -- let's move on to twice baked potatoes!

When Amanda told me before Christmas that she and some other friends were starting a new cooking club, Sweet as Pie, my first reaction was to tell her that it sounded awesome but that I wasn't interested. First, I'm already a flunk out/drop out of multiple cooking clubs. I just can't seem to sustain one hobby for too long. Heck, I've already taken up and gotten bored with a whole other hobby (photography) since I was last participating regularly in online cooking clubs. I loved food blogging probably as much as any other extracurricular I've ever participated in, but in the end I just couldn't keep up the pace.

Also, I had some hesitation about the recipe source for Sweet as Pie, the Pioneer Woman. I love the PW as much as the next person; if I'm looking for an apple cake or a no-holds-barred mac & cheese recipe, she's one of my go-tos, but for regular weeknight cooking, I (fairly or not) tend to think of her as one of the "superfluous butter" cooks (see also, Paula Deen, Ina Garten to a degree {sorry, I still love you Ina!!}, etc.) And that's just not how I cook {although it IS how I bake}. And that's definitely now how I want to cook starting the new year, when I've made all of the usual vows to eat healthier, exercise regularly, get organized, etc. (yawn).

But in the end the prospect of doing this on a small scale with Amanda and other friends was too enticing, and superfluous butter, by definition, can be omitted without any consequence to the recipe (being superfluous and all). So I figured that I would just modify PW's recipes if necessary in the event she got a little too exuberant with her added fats.

The first recipe I made was her twice baked potatoes. Who doesn't love twice baked potatoes? But wait, what's this? Yes, Ree wants us to use two sticks of butter for our 8 potatoes. Ree, Ree, Ree. I was born in 1972 (but very, very late in the year in 1972, very late). You can do the math. I hear the drumbeat of THAT age,and it's getting louder. At my age I probably shouldn't even eat a potato, much less a potato recipe that begins with two sticks of butter. And WHY would that much butter be necessary in a recipe that also calls for a cup of sour cream, bacon and cheese? Answer: it's not. It's. Just. Not.

And now I have the proof! I modified Ree's recipe as follows: instead of 2 sticks of butter, I used 5T of Brummel & Brown (I love the stuff as much as real butter - seriously); instead of 1 C of regular sour cream I used 3/4 cup of light sour cream (that's actually all I had in my fridge); and instead of a full cup each of bacon and cheese I used 1/2 cup of each. With the butter modification alone, I saved 1375 calories and 151 grams of fat in the whole recipe -- that is a week's worth of dessert! And these were completely wonderful and rich and decadent - even with the modifications they still felt like a total indulgence.

Horrid, unedited (because editing would not save this) photo of twice baked potatoes:



I only baked 8 potato halves for the 5 of us and froze the other 8 (which I never would have thought to do if not for a handy PW tip in her blog post), so we'll look forward to enjoying these again sometime soon.

It's better to give than to receive

{but sometimes, both the giving and the receiving work out very well!}

We are having a great, extended Christmas with my family. My sister and I both loved the present that we picked out for each other!

new wheels

We made it through 9.5 years of parenthood without a ginormous battery powered brightly colored plastic vehicle landing in our garage and thought we were in the clear, but when we woke up on Christmas morning we saw that Santa had left Caroline a pink and purple Surfer Girl jeep. She took it for a little joy ride the day after Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

{family Christmas photo made possible by tripod & clearly visible remote timer}
Just a few minutes left of what my kids have named the "best day ever!" And it was definitely a great one. Hope that yours was merry too!

All she wants for Christmas is . . . {drumroll please}

12 treats of Christmas, day 12: candy cane biscotti

I wanted to conclude the 12 days with something über-Christmasy, and bonus points if I could use up some of the crushed candy cane that had been sitting in bowls on my counter for week!! I knew that I'd found my 12th treat when I saw this post for candy cane biscotti on one of my favorite food blogs. What makes these perfect for the holidays, in addition to the fact that THEY CONTAIN CANDY CANES, is that they are really good keepers. Biscotti kind of taste dry and stale to begin with (but in a good way!) when you get right down to it, so if you eat one a week or so after they came out of the oven and they are kind of dry and stale (but buttery! And rich! And chock full o' candy canes!), well, that's how they are supposed to taste. And biscotti are meant to hold up to dipping -- in coffee, in hot chocolate -- so you don't want a dainty cookie that's going to fall apart on first plunge.

I wouldn't call myself a candy cane lover, but I am now a candy cane biscotti lover. The peppermint taste of the candy cane is not overwhelming here, and it's complemented nicely by the buttery cookie. This one is a keeper.

A right jolly old el(ves)

I think we may have gotten in on the early side on the elf craze, because for some reason we had elves causing mayhem at our house around Christmastime before their mass proliferation and takeover of the Christmas land. And now, the backlash has begun (see this hilarious article . I see (and agree with) many of her points.) That said, it's hard to understate how much these kids love their elves. They really do create a kind of Christmas magic for children that only comes with overturned furniture and Christmas trees rolled with TP.

Jacob has always been our most difficult child for the elves to please. Certain elf antics that I personally loved, like the time they joined in singing along with our Christmas carolers, left him seriously unimpressed. But this year Jacob is 9 and has joined Team Elf, if you know what I mean, and the girls tend to be delighted with whatever the elves decide to do.

Like decorating the palm tree? Jacob would have revolted when he was younger if that's all they managed to come up with. But the girls were tickled.



Now I start to worry when they start messing with the lights. Seriously -- we all know how temperamental these things can be. Thankfully they just needed a little untangling and we didn't wake up to a string of white lights that was only half illuminated.






Ah, the old post-it-note-all-over-the-house trick. They must have heard about this one from the elves back at the Pole. Why is it that whenever I need a post-it note, I can't find even one, but we get a bunch of Christmas elves running around the house and they manage to find a whole pad of them to stick all over the place?








Now we like to hold onto boxes in December because we tend to need them for mailing packages and wrapping presents. But David and I had just been talking about how we were probably good with the boxes and really needed to set a lot of them out to recycling, or we'd be buried in boxes after Christmas. And then the elves really drove home that point for us.





One night I could have sworn I heard this kind of knock-knock-knocking sound. When we woke up the next morning, we saw that the elves had been having an air hockey tournament in the basement.




Bix had on his game face.



They were cheered on by some Community Helper puppets.



I woke up early this morning and decided that I'd knock out the final treat for the 12 treats of Christmas project. Yeah -- maybe not. I couldn't even make my (desperately needed) coffee, because the elves had taken my kitchen twine and rigged up some kind of booby trap in my kitchen.





There's always a ringleader -- this time, it was Libby.



One thing about Christmas is that there is a lot of extra "stuff" around, and the elves seem use it to find trouble. One morning we woke up to find Bix's head stuck in the Nutcracker:



Libby (or is that Colline? I seriously cannot tell those two apart, and it drives my kids BONKERS) was trying to work the lever to free Bix (or was she holding the lever up to keep him stuck? You decide.) While Colline/Libby had gotten out the toolbox to look for something that would assist in Bix's liberation. It looks like they found the WD-40 -- even halfway smart elves know that WD-40 and duct tape can fix almost any problem.



Just a few more days with these elves! As is the case every year, my kids will be very sad about that, but David and I will be happy not to have "undo elf mischief" on our daily to-do list. But we'll miss watching the kids react to the daily antics of their tiny red and green friends!