Adding to the waistline with no regard

Pinterest is just full of great ideas, and not so great ideas. The latter being something I stumbled across called Christmas Crack. I was just ehh at the result of this too easy recipe, but someone else in its wake was smitten.

It's really rather easy. Line a Pam sprayed, aluminum foil cookie sheet with crackers--any type of crackers, club, graham, saltine, it doesn't matter. Then in a sauce pan, add two sticks of butter and one cup of brown sugar and bring to a boil for three minutes. Once the lava is nice and caramelized, pour it over the crackers and slide it a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. It's going to be bubbling when you remove it, but that's just the ticket to melt the bag of chocolate chips you'll sprinkle on top.

Smooth out the chocolate chips and then place in the freezer for 2 hours. I had a piece of bacon leftover from breakfast and diced it up and added to the top for good measure.

Needless to say, that the Christmas Crack was a hit, but not deemed so by me. I brought a tin full to my in-laws for the annual open house. When the time came, I opened the tin to find it empty!

"Someone ate the whole tin of Christmas Crack!" I immediately thought it was my father-in-law, but my mother-in-law quickly admitted that she ate it for lunch on Christmas Eve. I really thought she was joking.

It was no joke. That's the true definition of crack, I'd say.

Preserving the goodness

Every Christmas season, we are lucky enough to gain a few jars of Louisiana fruit preserves from Drue's relatives. This year, we were able to pick from his mom's collection (anything but the Mayhaw) of strawberry, blueberry and Uncle Mike's Sunquat preserves. By far, Drue is more partial to preserves than me, but the thought that some illustrious or novel fruit was canned for our later pleasure is really cool.

Our annual pilgrimage to Jesuit Bend for the 40 pound box of satsumas resulted in our first canning project. After squeezing a ton of them for straight up juice and cocktails and noshing on enough to ward off any illness (or not), there were many of the tiny orange sunbursts left. We headed to the Harry's Ace Hardware on Magazine for a dozen quilted canning jars and tried our hand at preserving a few weeks of Louisiana fall.

They, paired with the Lemoncello and Satsumacello, we'd been steeping, and homemade vanilla extract, filled out our homemade Christmas presents.

While home in Basile at Drue's folks for Christmas, his nephew Mattox picked several hundred kumquats, which we made into marmalade, stuffed the New Year's turkey with and ate our fair share. We're thinking candied kumquats next. There's still plenty left. What else what you recommend using all these kumquats for?

Then there's the haul of pink grapefruits off our friend Michael's tree up in the Irish Channel.