Hi there! Do you remember me? I’m the girl who convinced Shannon to start this awesome blog – just the two of us, being awesome online, I promised, it’ll be so fun to share our funny writings with each other, I reasoned – oh and then I totally bailed. Yay for me being awful and quitt-y!
Listen, people, I’m not here to make excuses. I am here to buy into the whole New Years Resolutions thing. The thing where we can all start fresh and new and become better people and work on our issues and that all of it has a totally great chance of working out if we make these commitments to ourselves in January. Don’t quit on me now, Early January Optimism!!!
So let’s talk about traditions. Holiday traditions. Traditions I do not understand. My mother-in-law who is a very nice person and completely the opposite of a stereotypical ‘bad’ mother-in-law I’ve heard about gave me some Christmas cookie/candy recipes. Because I decided that I was going to make Christmas cookies for my husband. Because Christmas eve fell right around Hanukkah and I felt bad that my husband was going to be subjected to all of this insane Jewish Russianness. So I decided to do a sweet (get it? ’cause they are cookies. Gawd, I KILL!) gesture.
Did you get all that? I asked for dessert recipes that my mother-in-law traditionally made for my husband when he was growing up. What I got was…unexpected…
What in the living hell is almond bark??? It’s chocolate colored, yet contains no chocolate. Why someone would take an afternoon of their time to dip ready-made pretzels from a supermarket bag into this almond bark mess when there are perfectly delicious chocolate-dipped pretzels at Trader Joe’s is beyond me. Rice Crispies cereal is now an ingredient? In a traditional Christmas thing you make every year?? What happened in America that instead of using quality ingredients in an old recipe, people use corn syrup?
This is the part of the post where I concede the point that I am a horrible stuck-up snob who should probably be immediately deported. Point conceded.
I plugged my little horrible snob nose and made the stuff. Then I went to the store, bought some good chocolate and made truffles and a Queen of Sheeba almond chocolate cake. You are free to guess which got eaten first.
Although, the caramels using my MIL’s recipes turned out pretty awesome. Even though they contain a can of sweetened condensed milk. SHAME!!!
