I cannot even imagine how difficult it must be for someone to have food allergies and have to check the labels of every thing that they buy at the grocery store, or ask the wait staff at a restaurant to find out what is used to prepare the meals. That must be a major pain in the neck! I’m really glad that so far I have not found any food that makes me ill, other than an occasional heart burn.

I love to look at the pictures of the recipes and imagine how great they would taste. I wish that I had time to fix most of them; but reality is that I’ll probably never have the time or energy to even prepare one tenth of one percent of them. I probably really should stop buying them. But it is so hard to resist!

When that little store closed up shop, it nearly broke my heart. Where was I ever going to experience such a divine taste again? Lo and behold – I found the Cheesecake.com website and they have a recipe for white chocolate cheesecake that sounds like it is something I could actually make from scratch myself. Drizzle a little bit of raspberry sauce over the top – well, okay, a LOT of raspberry sauce over the top, and I’ll bet that I’ll be able to recreate that flavor that I have been missing these many years. Maybe I’ll actually drag out that springform pan that I bought twenty years ago and never used and finally put it to use!

With my prize tucked safely in the car, getting ready to head home, I called Chad and told him that I was on my way home with the Caramel Praline Crunch ice cream that we love so much, and he cheered “awesome!” I asked him to please be ready to help me bring groceries in the house in twenty minutes (I ended up buying some porterhouse steaks on sale and some hamburger and some pork tenderloin too.) He was ready and waiting to hustle the food into the house and dish us out some of the coveted ice cream. Tonight, life was good.

The cup was a two cup measure, and I felt that it was a little bit cumbersome to pour just a little bit out at a time so I decided to use a plastic tablespoon measuring spoon and dip that into the cup and then pour the candy into the mold using the spoon. Each little mold took about one and a half tablespoonfuls to fill up.

I was worried about whether I should have sprayed the molds with cooking oil, but decided to try it without the oil, since the instructions that came with the candy melts did not indicate anything about greasing. We stayed up until 2am working on those candies!

I don’t even have any pastry bags, and I’m wondering if I should go out and buy some, or if there is a quick and easy way to make one ourselves from parchment paper or coffee filters. I’ll have to spend some time online to research that. Have you done anything like that before? How did you do it?

These coffee cups show up everywhere now. I see them in TV shows, on commercials, in the hands of people walking down the street. I thought it was a cute prank. Hope you got a laugh from it and have a great day!

Merry Christmas to all!

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!

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!