Joy to the World...

...the Lord is come!

Well, Christmas has come and gone. The decorations are still up and Christmas music is still playing in my mind, but we don't have the anticipation of Christmas day to look forward to any more. Happily, this joyous season continues for our family until at least January 8th. First comes New Years, then our anniversary on the 3rd, then Sonny's birthday on the 8th. After taking down the Christmas decorations the second week of January last year, my husband told me that I was a scrooge. I promised him that we could always leave the decorations up until after his birthday but it seems that he wouldn't be satisfied unless we leave them up all year long!

On Christmas Eve I made a ham that was given to me by a dear friend. It was the first ham I had ever made and it turned out delicious, however, I had a bit of trouble in the cooking process:

I mistakenly used a recipe for a 12 lb ham and didn't think to change the cooking time to match my much smaller one. If I had been home to baste it frequently like the recipe called for, I would have noticed that it was starting to get too done but we had a couple errands to run and we took MUCH longer than anticipated. We came home to that black thing! We believe that perhaps the outer black shell kept the inside nice and juicy, making for the most wonderful accident I could imagine! I would post the recipe on here for you, but I'd like to keep that a secret. It's something you would never expect so I'm not going to tell you! Haha! I've never had a food with a "secret ingredient" before, but this ham recipe will be it! We also had alfredo noodles and lima beans with corn. We ate by Christmas and candle light with my pretty table cloth all the way from India!

One of the gifts I received is a book called "The House that Cleans Itself: Creative Solutions for a Clean and Orderly House... in Less Time than You Can Imagine!" by Mindy Starns Clark. It is so helpful and fun to read and I can't wait to start implementing some of the steps detailed in this book. I will consider it my new challenge for January and will post about it soon! In the meantime, I'm still working on trying new, healthy recipes that I've never tried before. Last night I made polenta for the first time. I was going to use it with spaghetti sauce but my mom didn't like it, so we had noodles instead. I'm going to find a new way to have it other than with pasta sauce so we will all enjoy it!