Herbs & Cookies

Last night was my Herb Society's Christmas party. It was full of wonderful holiday tastes and smells. The talk was on different spice and herbs mixes to make for your holiday cooking, herbs to mix together for potpourri, and hot holiday drinks, like white hot chocolate (sinfully rich:) and spicey hot tea.

We all received a package of a parsley and dill herb dip mix, just mix with sour cream and mayo.

Six lucky winners received herbal "soup wreaths". The different wreaths were made with herbs that either go well with chicken or beef soup.

To make, when your herbs are fresh choose about six springs, bend the longest woody herb to form a loop, wrapping ends around each other. Add herbs and wrap with a long leaf herb such as chives to hold herbs on the wreath. Dry them and then package. They can be embellished with a small dried pepper or chive blossoms.

The out-going board members received a wonderful journal to record all our herb growing/cooking (dyeing) ideas in.

Like you I've been very busy getting everything ready for Christmas, we have two trees up, our whimsical Christmas village is set out, the outside fences are twinkling with little white lights and last weekend we started our cookie baking. This was my mothers favorite cookie book (I believe it's from the 60's).

We always made Mary's sugar cookie, I believe it's the best cut-out cookie there is! It's made with all the perfect ingredients, real butter, real vanilla & almond extract, and powder sugar. I always made them with my kids, using my childhood cookie cutters and now....

I'm making them with my grand kids, still using the my childhood cutters and ones I bought when my kids were little! Try that with 3 little boys!

They each cardfully cut out their own and placed them on the cookie sheet.

This weekend we're baking peanut butter cookies with chocolate stars and snowballs cookies with lots of crushed pecans.