Make Ahead Meal Exchange

I thought this was a good time to talk about our Make Ahead Meal (MAM) Exchange group.  If you haven't heard of MAMs, this is how they work:

• You gather a group of people who have similar meal needs as your family and whose cooking you think you'll enjoy.  Our group has 6 families currently participating.  We've talked about expanding a bit and have all agreed that about 8 would be our max, if we do add families.
• Once a month, you cook a large batch of whatever dish you choose, providing some for each family in the exchange.  You can decide the number of servings based upon the size of the families.  For our exchange, we make 4 servings for each family.  Counting our own families, this means making 24 servings of the dish that we're providing for the month.
• Package each dish in 1-family-size packaging (aluminum pan, gallon-size freezer bag, etc.) and freeze ahead of the exchange date.  Write on the packaging the name of the dish, date of freezing and basic cooking instructions.
• Choose a date to gather and make the swap.  We have picked the third Saturday of every month to swap meals.  We each bring 5 of the dish we made, along with the recipes, and trade with everyone else, coming home with 5 different meals in addition to the one we made ourselves.
• If we're unable to be there on a particular date, we make arrangements either with the host to drop off our meals ahead of time and pick ours up later, or to have another member of the group take our meals and pick ours up for us.

It's brilliant.  You just do one round of cooking per month and end up with 6 meals ready to thaw and cook, vastly cutting down on meal prep time for the nights you use those meals.  I've been thinking about doing more of this for our own family, doubling or tripling meals and freezing some for later use.  It's great saving labor and having things ready to go without having to put as much planning into it myself, plus I've gotten to try some really great dishes that the other women have made.  And I've been able to enjoy getting together and having some social time with them when we exchange.

Cookie & Candy Exchange

Tomorrow night is the annual Cookie & Candy Exchange for the women from my Sunday School class at church.  Many of us aren't regular attenders of the class anymore as it was a Young Marrieds class that's been going for some time and has evolved over time, as our schedules have evolved over time.  But we still get together for this and other events, and some of us ladies meet twice a month for prayer time.

This is such a nice highlight of the Christmas season.  Each of us makes half a dozen cookies or candies for each of the other women attending.  We bring them along with a non-sweet dish to share at the exchange, where we sit and eat and talk and just have a nice relaxing time in the midst of a busy season.  At the end, we leave with 9 or 10 (sometimes more) different types of holiday sweets to enjoy over the next few weeks, having only had to make a few batches of one kind ourselves!  Brilliant.  I love whoever came up with the idea of exchanges in the first place.  And that reminds me that I haven't blogged about Make Ahead Meals yet.  Next post!

This year for the Cookie & Candy Exchange, I'm making Praline Cookies with Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'll bet you wish you had the recipe for that, huh?  Here you go!  Praline Cookies and Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'm pretty much making the cookies as is, except I added more maple flavoring for a stronger maple taste.  Also, last year when I made some of these for the holidays, I used a whole pecan half on the top, but I found myself eating the cookies in a way to try to get a bite of pecan with the cookie.  This year, I'm coarsely chopping the pecans and sprinkling them across the top so that there's pecan in every bite.

I definitely recommend making them with the Brown Sugar Frosting drizzled over the top.  If you prefer your cookies on the less sweet side, you may want to skip the frosting.  Me?  They're cookies!  I like them sweet, and the frosting adds the perfect finishing touch.  The recipe says to cook the frosting in an iron skillet.  I just used a regular nonstick saucepan, and it worked fine.  I added about half a teaspoon of maple flavoring to the frosting.

This year's frosting ended up with a little different taste and darker color.  I think I must have used light brown sugar last year, and this year I went with the recipe's dark brown sugar.  I actually liked last year's better, so I'll be using light brown sugar when I make these again in the future.  I boiled it for a minute or two on the stove, then waited for it to thicken a little before starting to drizzle.  Apparently I waited a little too long, because it was solidifying while I still had a lot of cookies left to cover!  I had to work quickly, so it's a bit globby on some.  But I can't complain - these taste pretty good!

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

I have two jars of light mayonnaise in my refrigerator at the moment.  One is Best Foods Light Mayonnaise:

The other is Fred Meyer "Lite" Mayonnaise:

15 more calories and 1.5 grams of fat more in the Fred Meyer version than in the Best Foods version.  I don't know if the use of "lite" means "not as healthy as light but better than our regular version and we'll sell more this way," but if so, that seems more than a little deceptive.

I also have 2 light ranch salad dressings on hand.  Wishbone Light Ranch is 40 calories for 2 tablespoons, while Kraft Light Ranch is 80 calories.  That's a pretty big disparity.

I was never that careful a label reader before I started to track my calories a few months ago with Lose It.  I'd check packages sometimes for desserts or frozen meals or things like that, but I wouldn't necessarily pick up a bottle of salad dressing or a jar of mayonnaise to see how many calories and fat grams it contained or how it compared with other similar dressings/condiments.  I'm becoming much more aware that I need to check labels and not just assume that they're all roughly equivalent to one another.  That sometimes results in me paying a little more for the healthier version, but I think that's worth it.  It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make to lose the remaining extra pounds that I've carried for years.

Have I Turned a Little Grinchy?

I'm not sure why, but I just don't feel all that Christmasy this year.  I've been looking forward to this season with anticipation, but now that it's here, it doesn't feel like Christmastime.

Our tree has been decorated for the better part of a week, we hung up stockings a few nights ago, the outdoor decorations went out in full force yesterday, other decorations have been put up around the house (with some more to come), and I've been buying gifts for weeks, nay, months.  And over Thanksgiving weekend, we watched Elf and White Christmas.  Not to mention all the Christmas music we've been listening to.  So why am I not feeling it?

It seems like I'm not experiencing the sentimental/emotional side of it.  It's not that I'm busier this year than in past years.  In fact, if anything, I'm less busy than in most recent years.  And I don't think the opposite is true, that I need to be busier to feel like it's Christmas (heavens, no, not that!).  I just feel oddly disconnected somehow.

Nothing bad is happening (knock on wood), and we've had other years where the Christmas season was full of stress and emotional upheaval and we still felt like Christmas was happening.  Intellectually I get that it is, and I know that it's only 2 1/2 weeks until Christmas Eve.

Not sure what's going on, but I'd like to feel Christmas a little more this year.

Gift Giving, Part Deux

Part of my problem with wanting to buy gifts early for Christmas is that I really like to give the gifts.  So if I start buying Christmas gifts in, say, June or July, that's a really long time for me to wait to give the gift.  It's been my goal to start Christmas shopping around that time each year so that we can spread out the spending over a longer period of time and more easily absorb it into our regular budget.  I've managed to do some early Christmas shopping in the last couple of years, but not to stay on track with starting early and continuing at a regular pace.  It still helps, but I'd like to be more organized about it.

The other problem with buying gifts early is that it's hard to figure out what to get for some people, and for others such as Rachel, what if she doesn't still want the Purple Unicorn Pillow Pet by the time Christmas rolls around?  Or what if she requests it as a gift from Mom & Dad and decides she wants Santa to get her something else, when Santa has already bought the Pillow Pet and stowed it away?

So you see my dilemma.

Still, in 2011, I pledge to start Christmas shopping for the easy people no later than June and to buy a few things every month thereafter.  I can also probably start putting away stocking stuffers early since stockings can get expensive, too, if you buy everything for them all at once.

My other thought was that I could start a line item in Quicken for Christmas spending and start diverting some money from checking each month into that line item.  That way, I could shop later in the year if I need more time to come up with ideas, but the money's already "spent" in our budget and accounted for.