Dinner and Vanilla Extract

Last night Jami fried up some deer back strap (something like a pork tenderloin) that he or his dad harvested. If you fix this, be sure to get all of the white parts off, it's really tough.

While he was busy making dinner, I got busy making the vanilla extract.

Bottles ready for a hot bath.

I have a small pressure cooker that I do all of my canning in. You don't have to have the big guns to can!

All of the directions I found said to use kitchen scissors to cut the beans. I found a razor knife to be much, much easier.

This is what happens when you have hard water (and a silly husband!).

But, with a little vinegar it's good as gold!

All labled and ready to go! I really like how this turned out.

I'm off now until Monday! I hope you all have the loveliest Christmas possible!!!

The makings for a big 'ole weight gain!

Things have been pretty busy around the Old Homestead here lately between the normal routine and getting ready for Christmas. I really haven't felt like battling the crowds and the traffic to find that "perfect" store bought piece of crap that just so happened to be marketed right. Plus I flat out don't have the money to spend. So the hubbs and I put our heads together to figure out something the two of us could make in a one size fits all. Cookies!! Everybody loves fresh, home baked cookies, right? I haven't sat down and figured out the exact price of each, but considering that we had a lot of the ingredients stock piled in the pantry, it's not very much. I paid $1 per tin at the Dollar Tree and spent somewhere around $30 at the grocery store (hitting sales, of course!). We're expecting to get 1 1/2 - 2 dozen mixed cookies in each tin. The adults (16) have a slightly larger tin than the kids (only 2). We've been making the batter, balling up the dough, and freezing it so the baking will go smooth sailing. We're also making vanilla extract for the ladies of the family. Our bottles just came in yesterday, so we'll be getting on top of that tonight!

We're making at least one batch of each cookie, most of them making between 3 and 4 dozen cookies per batch.

The List:
Snickerdoodles
Pecan Pie Cookies
Tie-Dye Sugar Cookies
Chocolate Hazelnut Thins
Pinwheels
Oreo Cookies (not the store bought!)
Chocolate Crackle
Oreo Balls (doesn't require baking!)
Shortbread Thumbprint with blackberry jelly (homemade from the back yard!)

These are the ingredients for the Hazelnut thins. Nutella is soooo good!!
For our coffee lover friends I'm making chocolate covered coffee beans that are peppermint flavored and am toying with making them Fudgy Cappuccino cookies, but we'll see how time is going. I'll try to get some recipes posted of some of these soon.

My little helper complete with his pet beer!

My friend came over Sunday night to make some cookies of her own. We did the tie-dye sugar cookies, which was good since I wanted to try them first! It took a little while to do them, but they turned out great!

Cookies Cooling

This one was my favorite!
We finished up at about 11:30 that night with more than a couple of glasses of rum and coke... all in all it was a good night!