With the last shopping day before Christmas upon us, no doubt many are still out there scrambling to purchase those last presents.  At our age, though, the idea of  what constitutes a gift shifts away from the commercial, so we are proposing a different sort of gift exchange to our friends and family.

Last year I set up a recipes site so that we could have a place to store and share recipes.  We would like to invite all our friends and family to consider contributing one or more of your favourite recipes to the site.  If you are interested:

• This link will take you directly to the account creation screen.  You just need to enter a username and a valid email address.
• The site will email you a password which you can use to log into the site (you can change this to something more memorable later, if you like)
• Return to the site and log in
• Once you do that, you will see a menu option in the upper, right-hand corner to “Add a Recipe”
• At the next screen, click on “Recipe”

If,  when you are adding a recipe, you run out of space for ingredients, just save what you have done, and then return to the recipe to edit it.  More ingredients fields will have been added.

BTW, feel free to use this site at any time to store as many recipes as you want.  I find that by putting them here at least I can find them.  No more searching through cookbooks.

Thanks for thinking of us!

In exchange we offer up some of our family favourites:

• Carrot Ring – This one was handed down to us by Irene’s mom a number of years back, and it has become a staple whenever there’s a bird in the oven.  If you don’t have a ring mould, I’m sure you can adapt.
• Family Waffles – I like this one for its simplicity (no beating and folding egg whites here) and the size of the batch.  If you want to feed the family waffles for Christmas breakfast, this will certainly fill the bill.
• Kansas City Rib Rub – This summer, when pork ribs were cheap like borscht, this one saw a lot of use.  It may not be practical to do slow BBQ in this weather, but save it for when the snow disappears.

Merry Christmas to all.