Pasta Machine Success!

Here's the meal we had last night.....Lemon Pepper fettuccine with Greek shrimp, homemade French bread, and salad. It was very delicious and it was fun to experiment with my new pasta machine. First I made the bread dough in the bread machine, made it into a french loaf, glazed it with salt water and baked it. We made the sheets of pasta and laid them all out on the counter to get them ready to cut. Then we ran the sheets through the pasta machine again to cut it into the fettucinne. We laid the noodles all out on a plate....don't do this! When it was time to boil the noodles, they were all stuck together and we had to run it all through the machine and cut them again. DH is down in his workshop right now making me a noodle drying rack...you've got to have someplace to hang the noodles. While the noodles were cooking, the shrimp part was finishing up in another pan on the stovetop. It consisted of olive oil, lemon juice, onion, garlic, shrimp, parsley, and salt and pepper. When both parts were done, they were mixed together served with a few crumbles of feta cheese on top. Yum! I think we're going to make this again for New Year's Eve. We are getting together with four other couples and each are bringing part of the meal. The others are better cooks than we are, one of the couples even did a cooking class trip to Italy, so I hope this dish will pass muster! I wish I could get my pictures to lay out the way I wanted them!

Cookie Baking Crazy

Today DH and I hit the cookie baking hard. We have a tradition of making everyone's favorites for Christmas and putting them in the freezer so we can pull them out for cookie trays and to take to holiday gatherings. I started on Saturday by making 12 dozen Christmas tree shaped spritz with green sugar for the youth bake sale at church. I made them with butter and they tasted great. Today, after spending the entire morning at church, we made a shopping run for a few ingredients and then got baking. Not before putting on our oldest sweat pants however. You've got to have an elastic waits to bake cookies. :) I made almond crunchies, caramels, turtles, and chocolate covered caramels. DH made chocolate no-bake cookies, peanut butter blossoms, and Norwegian Kringla. We had a funafternoon and evening and I have a ton of goodies for the freezer. I'm glad that DH likes baking, it is a lot more fun with help and he even helps clean up and wash dishes. Here are some pictures of his kringla, just like his mom makes. We still have a few favorites to make and I realized I've got to make something with a little color since everything is brown or white so far. This week I plan to finally start my decorating and get the tree up, etc. Since we have about 6 inches of snow on the ground I don't think I'll be able to do outside lights again this year. We always seem to be busy on those nice late fall days when we should be putting up our lights.