Get ready for your family
By Staff
Suzanne Langcuster
The holiday season will soon be here.
The seasons of Thanks-giving and Christmas are right around the corner and there are things we can do to make it easier for us.
Canning, sewing, collecting recipes, and buying gifts ahead of time gives us a chance to spend more time with family and friends.
One of the things you can do now is to put up jellies, relishes, cocoa mixes and any kind of canned recipes you enjoy making.
This makes wonderful gifts to give individually or included in a holiday basket gift.
If you enjoy sewing, aprons and pot holders are two things that almost everyone can use in the kitchen. Aprons can be make with scraps or cloth or even quilt pieces. Patterns are not even needed to make an apron.
Try using a large kitchen cup towel, add some darts to one end to fit the waist better and sew on two strips of ribbon to each corner to make the ties.
Use Christmas colors. Towels do not need to be hemmed and are convenient to dry your hands quickly in the kitchen.
Use leftover material to make your potholders, and even small wash cloths are good to use – two sewn together with a small amount of stuffing in between.
Sue Frances Byars knits dishrags out of cotton yarn. She gave me several last Christmas in different patterns and I cherish them. They make wonderful dishrags. What a nice practical gift.
This is the time of the year you can start cooking your cookies for the holidays to freeze. Be sure you purchase the right kind of paper products or zip locks for freezing. It will make a difference.
Tins are wonderful to store and freeze cookies. They keep well.
Also, making loaves of different flavors such as apple loaves, pumpkin loaves and cranberry loaves can make nice holiday gifts.
These can be made in small loaf pans and frozen.
They are also wonderful to add to a basket gift.
Purchasing nuts, almond bark, chocolate chips, cake mixes, coconut and canned milks when the prices are good helps you when it comes time to bake and make pies, cakes and candy.
We will be sending you out some holiday ideas for gift giving in our future columns. Happy planning!
Suzanne Lungcaster is a food columnist for the Franklin County Times.
