Thanksgiving is just over a week a way and Christmas is fast approaching. The traditions that are part of these holidays are making their arrivals as well. At our house there are two main categories of traditional activities—movies and food. Most of the movies are Christmas-y, like Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Polar Express, The Muppets ‘Christmas Carol’…the list goes on. When it comes to food, though, there are three main items: Perogies, Polish Sausages and Cookies.
Alex and Sophia are ½ Polish from their dad’s side and while we were married, I learned lots of tasty Polish recipes, including perogies. Alex is not a huge fan of them, but Sophia and I love their, buttery, bacon-y deliciousness (at least the way we make ‘em–We’ll be sharing our recipe and our techniques in an upcoming episode of Two Kids Cooking). I guess when you fill pasta with mashed potatoes and bacon and serve it with butter and sour cream you should dedicate its consumption to ‘holiday tradition’ if you plan on not having a heart attack at the age of 30, but they are a must-have at our house during Thanksgiving and Christmas (and Easter too 
).
As for the sausage, we don’t make that ourselves, but we make sure to have some authentic polish sausage from Minneapolis’ Kramarczuk (http://www.kramarczuk.com/) on hand. Overall, sausage is just good; enough said.
And then there are the cookies…
Here’s the thing, I love cooking with the kids. This should be fairly obvious considering our entire website is dedicated to cooking with kids and spending quality family time while cooking and eating. BUT, Christmas cookies—you know those sugar cookies you rollout and cut into shapes, bake, frost and decorate—they kinda drive me crazy.
Why? There are two main reasons: 1) Colored sugar everywhere, 2) They never actually get eaten. I’m really not a neat freak, but when we’re in the kitchen, I like to try and keep things tolerably clean. Once those cookie sprinkles and colored sugars come out, however, they seem to have this way of dispersing; dispersing everywhere. And, Alex and Soph seem to enjoy a philosophy of quantity when it comes to the amount of decorations they ‘disperse,’—I actually think that much of the time there is way more decoration than there is cookie. These beautifully, and heavily, decorated works of art may be edible, but I prefer to consume them with my eyes only. I will say that Alex and Soph do enjoy making them (and they eat the too); so, despite my resistance each year, we always make a batch. I’m starting to think my resistance is part of the ‘tradition.’
We’ll make sure to share some photos of this year’s Christmas Cookie Sessions with you, but in the meantime, we hope you all have a great time carrying out your family’s Holiday Traditions.
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Another holiday and a bunch more drool-inducing recipes have flooded my google reader queue. So, in the spirit of giving, I’m going to pass on a few that have produced the most longing from my taste-buds:
