‘Tis the season to spend lots of time in the kitchen making yummy things.  I made a batch of apple butter last weekend, which turned out much better than the previous batch.  Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

• Making it in the crockpot just doesn’t work for me.  The edges burned easily and threw off the flavor.
• Puree the fruit well for best texture.  A potato masher won’t do it justice. The blender was perfect.
• Remember that it takes an hour for my canning pot to reach a rolling boil on my stove. Plan around that accordingly.
• An apple peeling gadget is my best friend.

Pumpkin Butter

This weekend I made a batch of pumpkin butter, which was infinitely easier when I settled for two cans of pumpkin puree after a half-hearted attempt to find a fresh sugar pumpkin. I used Saigon cinnamon, added a dash of cayenne pepper, and grated in a bit of orange peel. I had doubled the recipe for the pumpkin butter because the ten pounds of apples I processed last weekend only resulted in four half pint jars, and I need enough to give as gifts.  This brings me to the next lesson I’ve learned – always have more jars ready than you expect to use and pay attention to the yield before deciding to double the recipe.

I filled every sterile jar I had on hand, and still had a cup of pumpkin butter left over. Ack!  I found a recipe for pumpkin pancakes that needed a cup of pumpkin puree, which saved the day. Ditched the sugar and spices the recipe called for since the butter already contained it in spades, and used the Blueberry Basil vinegar I made this summer.  Wow.  Aaron said they were the best pancakes he ever had, and I’m inclined to agree.  Hooray for happy kitchen mistakes! Since I still have two pints of pumpkin butter not spoken for, there’s a good chance my holiday house guests will be treated to pancakes.

Spicy Bourbon Pecans

The other holiday treats I made this weekend are Spicy Bourbon Pecans and Belgian Fudge Cake (secret recipe).  These are my favorite holiday foods to make because they are easy to ship. Rumor has it that last time we sent a shipment to Aaron’s grandparents, Grandpa snuck away with most of it. Grandma loved the treats, but only got a bite of each one! This year, I planned ahead and am sending boxes marked with their names. Hopefully this will keep the fighting over the treats to a minimum.

Take out containers

I’m using Chinese take-out containers from the cash and carry store instead of the short-lifespan plastic containers I’ve purchased in years past. They have a good kitschy look to them, and a bag of 50 containers cost the equivalent of a few plastic containers. I cut out images from old Christmas cards for tags, and the end result are some pretty snazzily dressed holiday treats!

These were supposed to be the coolest geek gift ever.  They will be, eventually.  The stuff I got that I had to wear gloves to use and claimed to be etching cream was really just glorified translucent paint.  Temporary paint, at that.  Plus, I discovered that the sticky paper I used for masking is nearly impossible to remove after sitting for the ten days the “etching cream” needed to set.

Will pick up some of the Armour etching cream (which is supposed to work in hours, not days) in the near future.  Will test it out on these glasses before buying a new set of glasses and starting this all over again.

I had pinged Aaron’s friends to help me find good image sources for all of the Lantern symbols, agonized over how to get the symbols printed onto the right masking paper, then spent several hours cutting out the stencils with my Xacto knife.  The good news it that I know how to do this now, and have an electronic copy of the stencil patterns I used.  The bad news is that I need to cut all the stencils out again.  I haven’t seen any Cricut Green Lantern cartridges yet.  (Not that I actually own a Cricut…  Not a scrapbooker, either.)

It’s been a busy holiday season.  I baked several batches of the Oatmeal Orange cookies to send to my family, adapted a canvas bag into a laptop sleeve with a  “screenprinted” (read: freezer paper stencil and fabric paint) Marilyn silhouette, made lavender sachets, and sewed a flouncy dress-up skirt for my niece.  Oh, and knitted scarves for three people.  I had brought the scarf project for my MIL with me on our annual coastal Thanksgiving trip to work on because Aaron promised me if I told his Mom that I was making it for someone else, she wouldn’t make the connection that it was for her.  The yarn I used is a gorgeous teal color, and at one point she pointed out, “You know, that is my favorite color.”

At this point I bluffed and told her, “Gosh, I thought it was baby blue.”  This did not go over well.

I was fortunate enough to be with her in person when she opened the gift at Christmas, and just as Aaron promised, she was very surprised!  She told me she had spent the better part of Thanksgiving weekend wistfully looking at the scarf and wishing she had responded when I sent out the email asking for Christmas gift hints.  Apparently very few people sent me hints because they were worried that I was already overwhelmed with hints.

Made the ultimate impulse purchase last week of a gorgeous set of Weeping Angel paintings inspired by the Doctor Who episode, Blink.  Skelekitty rocks! She and I became friends on Flickr recently, bonding over our mutual love of funny signs.  After continually missing out on Erica Moen‘s sculptures that are getting snapped up as soon as they are posted, I did not want to miss out on these paintings.  Literally took me several hours to hang them because I measured, put up sticky notes, eyeballed it, and re-measured probably three times before I finally started hammering nails into the wall.  They look fabulous in my living room, and I couldn’t be happier.

Outside of starting the Lantern glasses again, I am also working on socks for Aaron, socks for Nana, and finishing off the projects for Laura and Chris that should have been finished months ago.  One of these days my crafty space needs a serious re-org.  All of this is dependent on me not getting too sucked into Catan or Katamari Forever.  Kingdom of Loathing is also a dangerous potential distraction, but I haven’t been as interested since Crimbo season ended.  Oh yeah, and I am starting up belly dance again in a few weeks, and spending more time with Wii Fit Plus.  Not much free time these days, but in a very good way.