Winter Comfort

Happy New Year!

Today my house smells like winter comfort.  I made homemade chicken broth from a left-over Costco chicken and chocolate chip cookies with the new baking sheets that Marnie gave me for Christmas.  I've got the laundry machines humming away and the sun is shining.  A very nice way to start the new year.

I stole this image from Anson Mills. 

I did not intend to bake so close to the end of the Christmas season.  My family has had their fill of homemade whipped shortbread, butter tarts, cheesecake squares, and ginger cookies.  However, I was unable to deliver a present over the holidays and I'm hoping that homemade chocolate chip cookies will work as an apology as I now deliver a new year's present.

The fun part is baking on these fabulous new baking sheets.  Before Marmie's present  I was using really small sheets much to Marn's exasperation.  "How can you bake on these, when you bake so often?!" she would cry.  And there hasn't been a baking session we've done together where I didn't secretly hope she would forget her baking sheets at my place and I could steal them.  But now I don't have to because I have my very own!  Thank you Marnie.

It feels like a switch has been thrown and life has resumed.  I'm picking up the threads of everyday details I laid down over the holidays and figuring out how to cope with the copious amounts of snow we've received over the month of December.  I love the snow, it's the wet boots, hats, mitts, and jackets that are throwing me for a bit of loop.  Of course the boot warmer that was on sale at Costco in August would be brilliantly helpful right now - alas my clairvoyant skills were not working that day and I'm stuck with a hairdryer, the clothes dryer and some strategic placement around the baseboard heaters.

I'm secretly dreaming about a snow blower.  You'll know things are going very well for me and mine when I have a snowblower for the one season in twenty where we get this kind of snow.

Also stole this image from Markham Mower Power Products as I do not have a snowblower... yet.

I would rather have the snow, and the wet boots than no snow and no opportunity to get boots wet.  Although when my youngest ended up sticking both boots in the freezing cold lake so he could break the shoreline ice "just like the big kids were doing Mom"  I realized we were going to have to have a winter safety talk.  And that without a boot warmer, it takes about four days to dry winter boots with a plastic coating - even with a hairdryer!