On Monday I had a good day. I got laundry nearly done, cleaned up the kitchen, finished the Christmas shopping online, (yes, we decided on a phone) and I think I got all the decorations on the tree. I was supervised throughout, as you see.
I had 4 boxes to go through and kept finding decorations in the bottom of each box. The top of each box had the colored glass balls. These are put on last. Usually I put hooks on as many as I can and then hang them in order. But there’s this cat, and glass balls don’t like bamboo floors much…
So I worked higgledy piggledy and got most of the decorations on and some of the smaller balls.
You can see the dead spots on the tree. That’s where the colored glass balls will reflect the lights. They will be the 1½” and 2” balls. I am hoping to finish on Tuesday.
When my brother made the baked beans on Sunday we got into a conversation about brown bread, something we always had with the beans. It’s a steamed pudding/bread, much like plum pudding. My brother wants to make both, but the plum puddings first.
My mom loved Haydn Pearson’s Country Flavor cookbook and we are guessing that’s the recipe she used. She always made a single recipe of hard sauce to serve on top of the pudding. With 6 kids and assorted adults, there was never “enough” hard sauce.
There was no recipe for hard sauce in Haydn’s book. So I called my oldest brother to see if there was a recipe my mom used. He thought there was in the bag of old recipes he had stored somewhere.
So yesterday I finally got it from him.
My mom had used more butter and vanilla than in the recipes I found in cookbooks. But the discussion raised the issue of whether it was vanilla, or a tablespoon of rum… She made fruit cakes and they were permeated with rum.
So we decided to make 2 recipes (because one was never “enough”), one with my brother’s Madagascar vanilla and one with dark rum.
On Tuesday my general helper will be here at 8AM. I have a lot of errands to run so I expect that’s all we will do. But if we finish early, we will probably work on the Christmas tree. I need to finish the laundry also.