Day 3: Christmas Cooking

Welcome to day 3 of my Christmas Diaries :-) I hope you are enjoying this month as much as I am!

Luke and I got our first Christmas card yesterday! I love Christmas cards. This was so exciting to me, and yet caused me to panic, because I have not even printed mine yet. I will be busy with that this weekend.

Anyway....

What is it about Christmas that puts me in the mood to cook? We all know that I'm always in the mood to bake desserts. However, it is a rare occasion that I am in the mood to cook a meal. This year the Christmas season has mysteriously caused me to tap into my meal-cooking side. If I have one :-P

I wanted to make a special dinner for Luke sometime this week. Lasagna was sounding so good to me. I decided to be adventurous and attempt to make my own homemade lasagna. This is something I've never done before, because usually the thought of making homemade lasagna causes me to break out in a cold sweat. But as I said, it's Christmastime. I might as well use this new (inevitably short-lived) excitement for cooking, and just go for it.

I pulled out my trusty, ginormous "Taste of Home" Cookbook, and found a recipe for traditional lasagna.
To my surprise, it actually didn't sound too difficult. I followed the directions and had no major catastrophes! I'm even going to go as far as to say that it was easy! I don't know why I've been so scared to make it all this time.

It did, however, take FOREVER. Having never made it before, I didn't realize it would take two-and-a-half hours from start to finish. So we ate dinner at 7 last night.

I took my cousin's advice and added lots of extra sauce and cheese.
I think I may have gone a little too far, though, because once we cut the lasagna, it no longer held it's shape, but just spilled all over the plate. I think I'd rather have that than dry, hard spots,though! I was trying to avoid the dry, hard spots and I think I overcompensated. (Update: Once it cooled down a little bit, it held it's shape quite nicely! I think it just needed to sit in the baking dish a little longer).

It may not look like it's supposed to in a perfect, tall, layered square. But I'm not going to lie...it was GOOD. Probably the best thing I've ever cooked. Not that that's saying much. But I was excited that it turned out okay!! Good thing I didn't mess it up too bad, because I'm pretty sure if we freeze some of it, it could feed us all winter :-P Luke laughed when he walked out to the table and saw how much I had made.

Also, the sauce was so good and easy to make! I'm definitely going to make it next time I make spaghetti.

And I can't forget to show you these lovely Christmas glasses from my grandma! She found them at an auction, and they just make me feel festive. Never mind the fact that they are so small we had to refill them three times during our meal.

To make a pretty great meal even better, we had my absolute favorite dessert of all time...

Apple Dumplings!!
(That is a miniature spoon, by the way. They weren't as monstrous as they look in the picture!)

I, unfortunately, cannot take credit for these. Although I did make the sauce. We ordered the dumplings from Luke's grandma. Her church was selling them as a fundraiser. They were still steaming when we ate them with vanilla ice cream. Is there anything closer to heaven on this earth than warm apple dumplings and vanilla ice cream?? ;-)

These are my favorite times with Luke: just spending time at home, enjoying each other's company and good food :-) I don't need a fancy date to make me happy!