Put your favorite recipes in this section.What favorite foods does your family enjoy at the holidays? Every family seems to have favorite cookie and candy recipes passed down for generations. The women in our family know how to light up the faces of our family with Norwegian Krumkage being turned on the stovetop, thin pancake Tynepanakage for Christmas Day breakfast, and Sand Tarts and Christmas Wreath cookies for an evening snack.
This section is for you to copy and include your favorite recipes, so they are available any time you want to get started. Also including your dinner menus for Thanksgiving and Christmas to save you a lot of time from year to year knowing what to put on your grocery list, when to thaw the turkey, and what favorite side dishes the family likes.
Put your favorite recipes in this section.
Include your menus tailor-made made for your guests
Snap a picture of your table and guests to remember for next year.
Tape your recipes on a sheet and make a copy to add to these sections. The more you keep the favorites here, the more likely you will be to bake.
Start to engage more of the family in cooking with you or preparing part of the meal. This makes it more fun for everyone.
Include your Thanksgiving and Christmas menus to make it easy to refer to, especially for years when you don’t have much time to get ready.
Recipes and Menus
One of the most celebrated traditions with a practical purpose is holiday food. From Christmas dinner, holiday parties, the neighborhood cookie exchange, and family favorite recipes, holidays become more festive with food. People are going to eat anyway, so why not serve their favorites and simplify the process for you?
To begin, pull together your favorite menus and recipes in this section and you are sure to be the hostess that everyone raves about. From simple Party Mix to decadent desserts, you can keep your guests happy during the season. It just takes planning ahead and deciding what you want to do with the time you have. And there’s always ordering out or potluck meals if you want to be free of kitchen duty.
The key to having guests over is keep them fed and keep them moving. This section we’ll focus on the food to create a festive mood. Customize it from your own recipe box and keep notes from year to year to simplify your grocery shopping, cooking, and baking.
Holiday Menus—List your menus for the holidays or the week of the holidays for easy reference every year. Once you build your repertoire on paper, it will be a breeze to pull together a traditional dinner no matter how busy you are right beforehand.
Baking Recipes—Copy or tape Christmas cookie recipes in this section to simplify retrieval and baking by having them all in one place. Once you include how long it takes to make and bake the whole batch, you can slot a batch in every Tuesday night, or Saturday before going out to a concert.
Cooking—Plan your cooking times so you know how early (or late) you can sleep in on Cooking—Thanksgiving and Christmas Day to get your turkey in the oven and still have dinner on time. Fine-tune your times and cooking order for traditional meals and you’ve simplified the day.
Settings—Include photo snapshots of serving your food creations and soon you will Settings—have your own photo cookbook of good food, table settings, and accessories to breeze through next year’s food festivities.