Welcome to December, friends!
I officially ushered in the month by getting a little holiday shopping done, baking up some cranberry cinnamon sweet buns (recipe coming soon!), and watching my fair share of Hallmark Christmas movies.
Buffalo has a pretty awesome little kitchen shop in town – The Abundant Kitchen. They carry a really nice selection of all kinds of fun stuff you might need for the kitchen – including food items. I’ve been meaning to sign up for a cooking class but the timing hasn’t worked out as of yet. I’m going to change that in 2019.
After stopping at a few other downtown shops on Saturday afternoon, Teacher Man and I headed to Haye’s Public House for a post-shopping beer. It’s kind of become our Saturday afternoon date ritual – beer and quizzing each other on the original Trivial Pursuit questions.
Saturday night, I made an early Hanukkah dinner for us. While I am not Jewish, my dad is so I think it’s important for Joe to learn about that side of his heritage as well. I served Tangy Spiced Beef Brisket, Noddle Kugel, and Latkes (or potato pancakes) — all recipes from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite food bloggers.
I’ve made brisket and latkes before, but the noodle kugel was a new adventure … it’s a very simple dish with egg noodles, eggs (8 of them!), cottage cheese, butter, vanilla, salt, and some sugar. It seems like a crazy combination but it was actually quite good! The sugar definitely gives it a sweeter taste but we liked it.
If you want to read a little about my family’s Jewish and Lutheran backgrounds, check out my blog post from a few years ago here.
Today, I put together a bunch of holiday-inspired LuLaRoe outfits to share with my VIP Shopping Group on Facebook, including these beauties:
And I noticed that my Lefse 101 blog post is trending, as it typically does this time of year. Lefse making is definitely on the agenda soon – maybe next weekend?
Coming up this week … I’m super excited to go to the Concordia College Christmas Concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis with my sister and a good friend of ours. The music will be outstanding, I’m sure! And the three of us will meet for dinner ahead of the concert to catch up on life. I love evenings like that and they don’t happen nearly often enough!
Have a great start to your week, my friends!
xoxo – Lara
