A List of Recaps

I have much to blog about, and a lack of creativity, so a list is ahead.

1. Our kids were able to come to our house for Christmas Day. (I can count on one hand the number of times we have been able to to that as a family.) (It was also the first time we had all been together in this house.) We had such a fun day together complete with eating lots of food and exchanging gifts.

Getting ready to dig into our feast. It was all very yummy! 

I love this family of mine sooo much!

2. Hubby read us the Christmas story from Luke 2. He also led us in a time of prayer and praise for what God has done for us by sending His son, Jesus to earth.

3. A couple of days after Christmas we headed to Iowa to see both of our parents. We weren't able to mesh our schedule with my side of the family, but we were able to spend a day with my parents and to surprise them with Caleb and Amanda. 

This quilt was on the bed we slept in and I marveled at how beautiful and well made it is. My grandmother made it 50+ (?) years ago. I wish I could have talked quilting with my grandmother.

4. We made a road trip to Kansas for the New Year's weekend. Hubby and I got there sooner than we had thought we might, so we decided to have a date night.

We had a hard time deciding on a restaurant because there are so many choices. (Choices is not what we have in this small, rural Minnesota town.) Kind of on whim, we choose a Japanese Steakhouse. It was excellent! I really enjoyed the evening.

Dates with Hubby are always good. :) (And no, I did not eat the tofu)

5. We spent our New Year's Eve at Megan and Zach's. They did a great job of hosting and we had a lot of good food and and played some fun games.

6. I would say the funnest, most fun, best fun, coolest thing that happened over the Christmas vacation was the result of a movie we watched with Caleb and Amanda. I had seen Julie & Julia in the theaters and recently bought the DVD on a whim. We sat down to watch it with Caleb and Amanda the night before Christmas Eve. (If you have never seen it, you should! Go here to watch a trailer of the movie.)

Basically the movie is about how Julia Child came to be, well, Julia Child. (Meryl Streep does an awesome job of protraying Julia.) Paralleled with that story is a story about a woman named Julie who was trying to find some purpose in her life. Julie decides to cook through Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year's time and blog about it.

Amanda (my daughter-in-law) and I started talking after the movie about how it would be cool to cook through a cookbook, but neither of us wanted to try out French cooking. (Maybe it was the aspic that did us in...). Since we both had a copy of Pioneer Woman's cookbook, we talked about working our way through that. When Megan (my daughter) got here, we threw the idea at her. 

What was the idea? The three of us are going to cook our way through Pioneer Woman Cooks AND blog about it here! We split up the recipes New Year's Eve and even made our first dish. (I'll blog about that in a few days.)

I am soooo excited about doing this. We'll attempt to post about once a week. I say attempt, because, while I have nothing better to do in this frozen trundra but cook and blog, my daughter is studying to be a Pharmacist and my daughter-in-law is studying to be a Doctor. They are kinda busy. But they excitedly agreed to work on this and I couldn't be more thrilled!

The Cooking Threesome. I think Hubby suggested we call ourselves "The Kan-Sota Connection" or something cheesy like that. :)

Here we are working hard at splitting up the recipes. (and no, this photo is not at all staged....) The dividing of the recipes consisted of comments such as, "My husband won't eat that, will yours?" And, "Ooo, I want to make this! Me too! Me too!"

So keep coming back here for some yummy food pictures and great blogging!