a peek inside the fishbowl

I’d like to steal Piper’s holiday photo from her Instagram account, but I’d like to substitute “treats” instead of “pizzle sticks” and leave the napping part intact. :)

Merry Christmas fishies! I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

I’m not a cookie baker. I’m a cookie EATER, but I’m not a cookie baker. So it goes without saying that every Christmas I feel like a failure in the cookie department. I just can’t motivate myself to mix together butter and sugar and crank out something that looks and tastes amazing. (Honestly, I prefer chips and cheese.)

So when I get my hands on an easy recipe that doesn’t require any work on my part, well, let’s just say it makes me pretty happy. So without further ado, let me present my friend Mari-beth’s recipe for Skor bars. It’s one of those recipes that you eat at someone’s house and then the hostess says something offhandedly such as: “did you know these are made out of crackers?” and then you faint, with a trail of crumbs falling out of your mouth and chocolate on your fingers, because you never imagined in your life that you can make something this delicious out of crackers.

WELL THIS IS IT. This is so easy it is ridonkulous. You can whip these up at the least convenient times; when your extended family phones FROM THE CAR and tells you they’re dropping by, the night before the class Christmas party, the afternoon of your office potluck, whenever. And everyone will rave about it and beg you to tell the story of how YOU MAKE MAGICAL THINGS OUT OF CRACKERS.

Mari-beth’s Skor bars

• One sleeve of Premium Plus crackers
• 1/2 lb  of butter
• 1 cup of brown sugar, packed
• 1 package of semi-sweet chocolate chips

1) Preheat the oven to 325F. Do this first, because everything comes together so quickly you will regret it if you don’t.

2) Grease the bottom and sides of a regular cookie sheet.

3) Dump the crackers in the pan and spread them out so they’re in a single layer. Eat remaining handful of crackers.

4) Combine the butter and sugar in a saucepan and boil ’em gently until they’re no longer separated and have formed a frothy brown syrup. (No need to use a candy thermometer! Woot!)

5) Pour the mixture evenly over the crackers. Bake for 12 minutes.

6) Remove from oven and sprinkle the chocolate chips over the whole shebang. Wait a minute for them to soften. Then, using the back of a spoon, gently swirl the chocolate to cover the sheet. Candy cane crumbs are optional. (Make these by smashing a few candy canes with a meat tenderizer.)

7) Let the tray cool a bit, then pop it in the fridge for about two hours. Once it’s set, use a sharp spatula to cut it all into pieces, right in the pan.

Let me know if you try these, and if you can refrain from eating half the tray as soon as they’re ready. :|

This is where my brain has been these past couple of weeks:

This is where my brain has been as I walked and up down Westboro and West Wellington/Hintonburg (two of my favourite shopping districts in Ottawa!), and this is where my brain was as I spent untold minutes idling in abysmal Merivale Road traffic yesterday.

The “four gift” idea has been making its way around the internet for a while now, and I can’t take credit for it or tell you who thought of it first. I liked it when I first saw it, and floated the idea by the family awhile back. This year we decided to try it out and put it into play. We are doing so partly because I think we all accept the fact that we don’t need a mountain of gifts under the tree, and also because we’re planning a couple of nice getaways in the coming months. My preference is to spend our few extra dollars on Doing Fun Things as opposed to Having Too Many Things.

I have avoided writing about the four gifts idea because there are many people who exchange fewer gifts out of necessity, and I don’t want to toot my own horn or be annoying about it. I’m writing about it today because of this blog post over at Globetrotting Mama. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. To summarize: Heather’s family hasn’t exchanged gifts for four years. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I know Heather personally and we went to school together.) Heather’s family is a travelling family. This is something I aspire to as well although we are not at a point in our lives where this can happen very easily. But, maybe some day we will.

So, yes. Four gifts. The girls made their wish lists awhile back. ONE of them helpfully divided her list up by category – Want, Need, Wear, Read – and the other didn’t bother, which left us guessing a bit. I will say it’s been tough to stick to the four gift rule because the temptation to pick things up on impulse is very strong. I did it, but I cheated a bit because I have a feeling the girls’ stockings will be overstuffed. The good news is that we’ve spent less on gifts this year and there’s less to wrap. What remains to be seen is how we feel on Christmas Day. Will it be sad to see less under the tree, especially after so many years of the volcano effect? (a.k.a the overflowing pile under the tree that spreads like lava beyond the borders of the tree skirt?) We’ll see, I guess.