Flour

I got an early Christmas gift this week - the Flour Bakery cookbook! I first heard of this bakery when it was featured on Throwdown with Bobby Flay for its sticky buns (top left of the picture). If I ever make it to Boston, you can bet that I will stop by this place for a treat!

I can't wait to get into this book! There are recipes for the sticky buns, creme-filled donuts, homeade pop-tarts and homeade oreos. Now... what to make first!?!

3rd Dish of Christmas 2010 - Minestrone

First - Today is the hubs birthday! Happy Birthday Mike!

I found yet another recipe on the kitchn's website - minestrone soup. This soup is an easy one-pot dish that has a lot of ingredients that you probably have on hand. I made this because we haven't had a lot of time for good, healthy meals between Mike's long retail hours and my hours at work lately. I am going to bring a couple of extra servings to keep in the fridge at work so I don't have to order out every time we stay late over the next week or so! If we're having it at home... I'll probably make a grilled cheese to go with a warm bowl of the soup!

Quick side note - the recipe says that you can leave out the bacon to start and use olive oil instead... if I said the hubs is a bacon fan, it would be quite the understatement, so I of course started with the bacon! I, however, did only use 2 slices of bacon instead of the 3 the recipe called for to decrease the amount of grease. What was left in the pot cooked out really quickly as the vegetables were softening and there is no greasy reside to the end product!

2nd Dish of Christmas 2010 - Chocolate Dipped Peppermint Biscotti

For my second dish of Christmas, I made chocolate dipped peppermint biscotti (basically a twice baked cookie) from the kitchn website. This was a really easy recipe and I'm pretty interested in the other biscotti recipe listed in that post. I bet it smells great!

The smell of the peppermint extract in this recipe is still lingering in our kitchen 10 hours after baking. The smell + Christmas tree and stockings mean Christmas is in full gear at our house! For our tree, I stuck with the mini tree I have been using the past few years and am going with a silver/gold/white theme. I already had some silver and white ornaments from prior years and picked up a few gold ones today. Mike got a camera ornament from Laura and my mom brought us a "new home" ornament over Thanksgiving so we are all decked out! Next up is to decorate the outside for the neighborhood contest :)