Cheese and trees

Christmas is coming; the mail is getting fat. Every day brings a bundle of catalogs for things we neither need nor want. Terry once again had the honor of being pre-approved for $1000 credit to buy cheese.

How much cheese does $1000 buy?

Considering the wildly exorbitant prices in the catalog, $1000 doesn’t go as far as one might assume.

We started another jigsaw puzzle Thanksgiving weekend, but this last week was so frantic, I had no time to work on it. There it sat in the middle of Hilda’s living room. We invited Jane to brunch this morning so she and I could get it done.

I came across a recipe for pumpkin pancakes. I was skeptical because it did not call for buttermilk, which I regard as an essential ingredient for light pancakes. It did involve beating egg whites, so I thought it might be okay.

Pumpkin pancakes on the griddle

The pancakes were very good, thin and airy. We ate until we could eat no more, and there were still 9 pancakes left to be microwaved for breakfast later in the week.

Let's plate this dish!

Jane and I worked for two hours to get the puzzle done. As usual, the hardest parts were the “fillers”, in this case, snow and sky. Not much to go on there. We got down to just trying every piece that had the right combinations of innies and outies.

Too much snow...

We got our trees decorated. Hilda used the tiny baskets (which she made back in her basket-making years) and white doves with multi-color lights.

Hilda's tree

We also used multicolor lights and put up our collection of mismatched ornaments, because that’s how we roll.

Our tree

Soon it will be time to bake cookies!