Mr. FixIt and I split the holiday shopping duties. I take care of the girls. He takes care of the boys. Which isn’t really even because there’s a lot more girls than there are boys in our family. I don’t really mind, though. I know how to shop for girls…I’ve done it forever! Mr. FixIt took off for town yesterday morning to do his shopping and left me at home to bake. I needed to add to the cookie trove.

The first thing I did was make Rolo Turtles. You know, the ones that use a square pretzel for the base and you put a Rolo in the middle. You put the cookie sheet filled with these in a 250° oven for about four minutes. When you take them out, you press half a pecan on the top and let them cool. Easy peasy!

I also made Two Ingredient Fudge. It is SUPER easy to make. Line an 8×8 baking dish with parchment paper. I sprayed a little nonstick cooking spray on the glass to help it stick. Pour 2.5 cups of semisweet chocolate chips and one can of sweetened condensed milk in a glass bowl. Microwave for two minutes. Stir it all together and scrape it out into the parchment lined dish. You have to work fast because it hardens up pretty quickly. Put some plastic wrap over it and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. Take it out. Lift out the fudge by the parchment paper “handles”. Cut in squares. SUPER easy!

Then I made Cowboy Cookies. I have a dear friend who makes them. Patti is the Head Baker Gal for Buffalo Baking Co. based in Colorado. She makes the BEST Cowboy Cookies! Mine don’t hold a candle to hers, but Mr. FixIt says they’re REALLY good! A Cowboy Cookie is a chocolate chip cookie with a twist. It has oats, coconut and pecans in the recipe which makes for a really nice, dense, chewy cookie. I used a recipe from Food Network. You can find it HERE. But if you want the real deal, you can order some from my friend HERE.

I finally finished around 9:30 last night. I got a surprise phone call from my Uncle Bud…the uncle that owned the family farm and sold it last year. Bud was a Junior in High School when I was born so he wasn’t all that much older than me. We never had money to go on vacations when I was growing up, but we went every summer for a week to visit my Uncle Bud and Aunt Viv. It was a week of playing with my cousins and our moms would sit in the kitchen talking and drinking coffee all day. 

Uncle Bud would pile us kids in his little VW Bug and takes us to all kinds of places…the fish hatchery or huckleberry picking on Dolly Sods. He was a practical joker. He told me one time he’d caught a mongoose and it was in a box in the basement. He took us down to see it. There was a little hole in the door and he said if I bent down and looked in, I might catch a glimpse of it. When I bent down, he released a latch and the door opened and out flew an old raccoon tail he had on a spring. It about scared me to death and everyone laughed…including me once I got my heart back in my chest! I think now he might think that was a dirty trick, but we were young and entertainment was scarce.

Mr. FixIt’s Peanut Butter Blossoms

Anyway, it was so nice to talk with him. I told him about my cookie baking and he told me how they didn’t have sugar when he was growing up because it was rationed in the war. Everyone had a cane patch and a Mr. Williams from over near where we live would go around the countryside with a portable cane mill. He’d work a pipe that turned a big roller and it would squeeze the juice out of the cane. Then that juice would be boiled down to make sorghum molasses. And that’s what folks used for a sweetener.

When I was little, Grandma always had a jar of sorghum in the pantry. Grandma had a milk cow and we churned our own butter. In the spring, the butter took on the flavor of the spring onions the cow got into so toast with butter took on a taste that wasn’t necessarily pleasant to a kid. Grandma would mash the butter up in a dish and add sorghum and stir it up. Then I spread that on my toast. It covered up the funny taste of spring butter really well.

Just having that half hour or so to reminisce with my sweet uncle did me a world of good. It lightened my heart and it turned out to be a lovely day. I set up our new Apple TV and played with it a bit between batches of cookies. I haven’t figured out how to watch the nightly news in real time yet, but I’ve only just begun to explore it. There’s certainly a lot to see that’s free.

We’re going into town today for just a couple more things. I told Mr. FixIt exactly what I’d like for Christmas and he said he thought I’d better come with him to pick it out myself. I don’t mind that at all. Maybe we can find something perfect for him, too! Honestly…we need nothing. But it’s nice to have a little something to open on Christmas morning.

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“Give us this day our daily bread,”

Matthew 6:11 ESV