To you and yours…

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The following four ingredients take 5 minutes to assemble…

The resulting meat will be feeding your family and guests for days on end…

And they deliver the most versatile, easy, meal-making thing you’ll have had in your refrigerator in a long time.

Tender, juicy, and tantalizing Kalua Pork is amazing as is. Stuffed into a toasted roll – pretzel rolls being my personal favorite – is a meal in itself.

But there is so much more you can do with it; add to omelets or frittatas. Fill a wrap or toss into a salad. Pile into tortillas or crisp lettuce leaves, garnished with tomatoes, guacamole and salsa, for sumptuous tacos or lettuce wraps.

You get the idea – this stuff is versatile!

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This recipe came from the food section of our newspaper and was provided by our local dairy, Shamrock Farms.

We didn’t trim our tree until Saturday, once the kids and my mother-in-law arrived. So the night before, I put together this breakfast dish while I waited for Marissa’s plane to get in from San Francisco. It was scheduled for midnight but delayed until 2:00 AM. I made good use of the extra two hours and wrote out all my Christmas cards as well… blurry-eyed, but I got it done!

We all enjoyed breakfast and tree-trimming, with carols playing in the background and coffee and hot chocolate mugs in our hands.

I made a few changes to the recipe; using actual rum instead of rum extract and subbing cinnamon bread for the firm white or whole wheat that was suggested. Additionally, I’ve decreased the number of eggs used in the mixture.

This eggnog French toast was a huge hit with the family and will likely become a new holiday tradition for us.

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Exactly!

A dream come true!

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As I’ve told you many times before, I am NOT a baker.

I don’t like to bake.
I don’t have the patience to bake.
I am not skilled at baking.

That being said – I baked these cupcakes… and they are The BOMB!

Seriously! I gave Connor one to sample and his eyes rolled back in his head with delight! He made me promise him that I would make them for his birthday in May. That is a promise I intend to keep!

The recipe came from HERE.

If every recipe on bakersroyale.com is as scrumptious as these cupcakes, and if YOU love to bake, you should be going to this site every day from here on out!

All I did was change them from standard cupcakes to mini cupcakes. Otherwise, I followed the recipe almost as written and they were perfection! So much so, that I could eat the caramel frosting, with a huge spoon, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

OK, maybe not! The frosting alone has a pound of butter – but to be fair, there was quite a bit of frosting left over, even after all the cupcakes were made.

To prevent me from using a spoon to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I put it in the trash and then dumped the nasty contents of my Roomba on top of it!

I can’t have that sort of temptation around here!

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I served this appetizer at the Christmas Craft Party and I’ll be bringing it to a family Christmas party next this weekend. (I think I may be in denial that Christmas is a week from Today!)

It is chicken nachos, minus the chips!

In the place of chips are those adorable mini bell peppers you can find in most grocery stores and always at Costco.

I was in a super time-crunch for the craft party so I used a new product I found at Costco, rotisserie chicken breast meat. It came in a 2 1/2 pound package, I pulled out what I needed, and froze the rest.

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This, the simplest and the least expensive of the crafts, is my absolute favorite. So sweet and old-fashioned.

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A girlfriend sent this to me and it’s just too funny to not share!

Click HERE to enjoy video. If it stops while you are watching it – pause it for a moment to let it load more and then press play again.

The following instructions are for the easiest winter craft ever.

Although we did not make these at last weekend’s craft party, I will be making them at a private craft party this weekend.

Many thanks to Barb Fenzl and Les Gourmettes Cooking School for helping me collect enough clear wine bottles! 

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A lovely, easy, and rustic project at the 2013 Christmas Craft Party was this pine cone garland.

I found the rope at Home Depot. A 50-foot package costs about $8 and is enough for 4 garlands.

We don’t have many pine trees in the desert, so I purchased the pine cones at Hobby Lobby and Micheal’s. That is also where I found the thin jewelry wire used to attach the pine cones to the rope and the ribbon and bells used for decoration.

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