Indoor Holiday Decor
After picking up our tree on Tuesday, we pulled out the bins of holiday decor from the basement and set about decorating the inside of our home for Christmas. I’m partial to natural decor inside just like I am outside. I usually stick to white lights, glass balls, pine cones, and a few strings of glass beads when it comes to trimming the tree. Here’s a peek at the holidays inside the cottage at Chiot’s Run.
I made some mixed pine garland from those pine boughs we got at the Christmas tree farm and put it over the sliding glass door in the dining room. I simply love these little mica tree silhouette lights I got a long time ago, they are handled gingerly and strung up around the house each year. I had so much fresh pine left that I even put it on the light fixtures.
Of course the best part is the way the lights warm the house at night. We put our tree lights on a dimmer so we can dim them if we want to. I always love looking at them all squinty eyed to make them blurry.
Last year we didn’t put any Christmas decorations up in the house except for some of my nativity sets. Mr Chiots was very sad and said this year he wanted it really festive. I think we’ve achieved that, he’s very happy.
How do you decorate the inside of your home during the holidays? Do you go all out, or do it simply? (if you’ve posted about it on your blog, add a link below, I’d love to see it)
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Friday Favorite: Christmas Music
Mr Chiots and I are HUGE fans of Christmas music. We have an extensive collection with 492 songs on our playlist, yeah that’s right 492 different Christmas songs on our iPod. Our tastes vary quite a bit, we have everything from traditional blue grass, and George Strait, to Elvis, Johnny Mathis, and other classics. We also have some rock versions and of course no Christmas music collection is complete without Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas. I have some very talented friends that came out with a small Christmas album last year that we love as well, check it out Ellery Christmas.
I think my all time favorite Christmas song is O Come All Ye Faithful by Sara Evans with Suzy Snowflake by Rosemary Clooney (listen to it on YouTube) and Blue Christmas by Elvis coming in a close second. We have an old Bluegrass Christmas CD that you can’t find any more that’s our all-time favorite when it comes to entire albums. Here are a few of our other most favorite albums:
There are few kinds of Christmas music we don’t really enjoy, things like Manheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra are just not our thing.
Does Christmas music play in your car and home during the holiday season, what are some of your favorites?
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O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree
Late Tuesday afternoon, Mr Chiots and I decided to head down to the local tree farm to get our Christmas tree. We went to Williamson Tree Farm on the outskirts of Carrollton, OH. It’s a small tree farm, very understated. They don’t have horse drawn carriages, nice big barns and all that stuff. They do have great service, great trees and great prices.
This was our first year getting a real Christmas tree since we’ve gotten married. We’ve had a fake one up until the year before last, we didn’t put anything up last year. When I was growing up we always had a fresh tree, we’d often make a trip of heading out to the tree farm to pick our perfect tree.
It was a cold day, the temperature was in the low 20’s when we left and right around 20 when we arrived home. That didn’t stop the tree farm people, they were all bundled up and ready to take you out to choose and cut your perfect tree. We picked out a cute little Frasier fir with lots of character (aka not perfect and straight).
We put our tree in the car, which just fit. Then we grabbed a bunch of pine boughs for decorating the stair railing and a few other spots around the house and we were on our way. They let us take as much of this as we wanted for free – a great bonus to shopping at a little tree farm instead of one of the big places!
One of things I love about this tree farm is that since it’s small, they plant the new trees in the spots in the field where others are cut down. Here’s a cute little future Christmas tree, in 5 or 6 years it will be filling someone’s home with holiday cheer.
Our little tree is set up in our living room. We decorated it with lights a few ornaments on Tuesday evening and it’s now bringing that wonderful fresh pine smell to our home and filling it with holiday cheer.
What kind of tree graces your home during the holidays?
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Celebrate a Handmade/Homemade Holiday
Many years ago we started celebrating a handmade/homemade holiday with my family. It’s been a lot of fun every year trying to come up with things that I can make for everyone. One year I made cloth shopping bags, another year I made jams/jellies and cinnamon rolls. Last year I started the tradition of making calendars and carried it on this year (I had family members asking if I was going to do it again, so I guess it was a hit). I certainly enjoy making gifts myself since I’m a very creative person.
Celebrating a handmade holiday can be difficult if you aren’t creatively inclined, you may feel like you don’t have the skills to make something. You may not have the time to make gifts yourself. You can still celebrate by buying handmade from others. Your local farmer’s market may be a great resource and Etsy.com is fabulous as well. I have purchased a few gifts from Etsy this year, things I don’t have time to make myself, or things I don’t want to invest in the supplies to make. Head over to Not Dabbling today – I’m posting about how to make a few simple gifts with scrap fabric.
Do you ever make gifts or buy handmade from others? Any great ideas for handmade/homemade gifts for this holiday season?
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A Delicious Mistake
On Saturday I decided to bake up a batch of cranberry rolls just for Mr Chiots’ arrival home from his week of hunting. He loves these and would be thrilled to have some when he got home. These are a delicious way to use up some of that extra cranberry apple relish you have sitting in the fridge from Thanksgiving. I made a batch of dough, rolled it out, filled it with cranberry relish, put them in a pan and whacked them in the oven. They smelled fantastic while baking.
Then it all went south (no offense to those of you who live in the South). I always use a thermometer to determine when my bread is finished, especially rolls. I like to bake them to about 185, when they’ll be slightly doughy, but not too much. I like them this way and I find that they stay fresh longer. I pulled out my thermometer to test the dough and it only registered 85. “Weird!” I thought, “they’ve been in long enough” (note to self, always trust instincts). I put them back in the oven for 10 more minutes then checked them again, still not much warmer. It was then I noticed that the thermometer had been switched to Celsius. I switched it quickly back and it registered over 210 – too high for soft rolls.
I let them cool hoping for the best, but they were too dry and the edges were extremely crispy. They were OK, still edible if we wanted to eat them, but not the culinary delight I was hoping for. I suddenly remembered a recipe for plum bread pudding in The River Cottage Cookbook (fabulous book BTW, if you want a great read about growing/raising your own quality food with cheeky UK humor read this book, I’m thoroughly enjoying it).
These rolls would make the best bread pudding ever, with their rich sweet dough, the cranberries and ginger already inside. I followed the recipe for the most part, steeping the milk & cream with a vanilla bean and some cinnamon sticks, I added a few more spoonfuls of cranberries in with the torn bread. I reduced the sugar by half, since I was using sweet bread and I don’t like my food to be too sweet. I doubled the recipe below to use up the entire batch of rolls.
Cranberry Bread Pudding
(adapted from The River Cottage Cookbook)
1 small loaf of stale bread (or in this case a half a batch of rolls)
2 cups of whole milk
3/4 cup cream
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
3 sticks of cinnamon
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
Cranberry relish left over from Thanksgiving (about 1 cup or more to taste)
1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger (optional)
Split vanilla bean lengthwise and place it in pan with milk and cream along with cinnamon sticks. Bring them almost to a boil, turn off heat, allow to steep for 20-30 minutes.
In large bowl, whisk eggs, egg yolks and sugar together until thoroughly blended. Remove vanilla bean and cinnamon sticks from milk (you can rinse and use again for mulling cider, flavoring sugar, etc). Pour the cream and milk slowly into the egg mixture stirring with whisk to combine into a well-blended custard.
Cut bread into slices or tear into large chunks. Layer in buttered tall casserole dish, occasionally adding small spoonfuls of cranberry relish and sprinkling in crystallized ginger as you fill dish.
Pour the custard slowly over the bread moving around the dish, work slowly so it is absorbed. Let dish rest for 30 minutes while preheating oven to 350.
Bake for 30-40 minutes until the top is golden brown and the custard is just set but still slightly wobbly (you can test with knife to see if it’s done). Serve while warm. It’s also delicious cold the next day.
It baked up into the most wonderfully delicious breakfast. Crispy on the outside and on top, rich and gooey on the inside, like good custardy french toast *only better*. It could be topped with some vanilla sauce if desired, but that would make it sweeter and much closer to a dessert than a good hearty breakfast.
My over baked rolls turned into the most delicious mistake, better than the intended recipe – here’s to making most of a bad thing!
Have you ever made the most of a cooking mistake and ended up with something far better with a little creativity?
