Amy Currioman

Well, here it is, Christmas morning and so far the house is still quiet. There are no longer young children that waken the adults at the crack of dawn with cries of “Santa came!”  Such memories are sweet, but I do enjoy being able to drink my morning tea while starting to prepare our traditional holiday morning cinnamon buns. I won’t wake anyone else until I’ve finished making them and put the turkey in the oven. Once everyone else gets up, it will be a busy, noisy, joyous day.

Merry Christmas to all!

I was asked by my mother to host the family Christmas dinner at my house this year. I’ve been hosting the family dinner here every year for the past several years and I really would prefer to go out to eat Christmas dinner at a restaurant. Having around twenty people here is not an easy task. My hubby and kids don’t want the dinner here, so they mope and complain about it. There are other family members that only come here out of a sense of duty, and you can tell that they would rather be at their own homes celebrating inside a bottle. Still others simply say that they want to start new traditions with their own family that don’t include being with the rest of “our” family. Is every single family this dysfunctional?

I’m thinking about trying to start a new tradition at the dinner that would make everyone happy that they came. I just don’t know yet what that will be.  Maybe starting a food fight!

Well, it’s Pizza night!  We like to eat pizza on Friday nights.  If we can afford to buy take-out pizza we do that.  Our favorite take-out pizza is Pizza Hut’s pan pizza; we like to order the meat-lover’s pizza and an order of their cheese bread sticks.  If someone is working in town, or has to go into town for some other reason, we’ll consider doing Pizza Hut for pizza night. 

If not, then we go to the freezer and take out a DiGiorno’s Rising dough three meant pizza and cook it at home.  It’s almost as good as Pizza Hut, and it’s more economical, so we’ve been doing that a lot more often lately.  And it’s faster to cook one of those than it is to send someone into town to get a take-out pizza.  I make sure to line the pizza pan with aluminum foil before cooking the pizza so that afterwards I just throw the foil away and have no pan to cook, so that makes it easy to clean-up afterwards too!

Tonight is a DiGiorno’s night – it’s cooking right now as I’m typing.  It sure smells yummy!

Over the years I’ve learned some interesting things about tricks restaurants use on their customers. A long time ago I read some literature about how different colors effect different moods. For example, red, yellow and orange are “high energy” colors and are often used in fast food restaurants because the restaurants know that those colors will encourage the customers to eat quickly and leave (making room for more customers) and the “high end” restaurants will often use “calming” colors such as blues and greens to encourage their customers to linger longer (perhaps order more alcohol which is their big money maker) and order dessert, relaxing and enjoying their meal and the company they are keeping.

I was just reading an article on the Time.com website about “what makes you eat more food” and was surprised to read that one of the things that makes you eat more food in restaurants is that most restaurants turn their thermometers to cooler temperatures. When the body is cold, a natural reaction to warm up is to eat more food. So the restaurants are trying to get you to eat more food by making their customers cold!

Do you ever feel hungry but don’t want to eat anything? That happens to me all the time! My stomach is growling and my hands start to tremble, and I even get a hunger headache! But I don’t want to eat anything – nothing appeals to me! This is a dangerous time because now is the time that I would probably grab some empty-calorie type of snack just to head off the hunger pains! I’d love to be able to grab an apple – we were given a ton of them recently, but for some crazy reason ten minutes after I’ve eaten an apple I feel hungrier than I did before I ate it! Sounds crazy, right?