So, for a woman who spent much of this 2008 praying for a husband away serving in Iraq, I'm glad as hell this year is over. Glad as hell. I remember long training runs back in July along the Chicago lakefront thinking to myself how I couldn't wait for snow to be on the ground and Eric to be home safe. Now, marathon medal hanging in the next room and my husband safely sitting on the sofa next to me, I look to God and to the calendar and ponder what is next.

A long-time tradition that I've kept with myself as each new year approaches is to pray for a hint as to what this new year brings me. How to best approach it. I have to be patient and listen, but eventually God lets me know. He always keeps it to just a few words but they ring as strong and true as a church bell. And they are never wrong.

In 2006, God's answer to how would the year would be was that challenges would be faced easily and achievements would be great. They truly were. I had met Eric in the fall of 2005 and we easily feel in love and in rhythm with one another in the new year. I was on the best improv team I'd ever experienced (The Washington Generals at iO, and began my sketch comedy show GIRLY. My job was going strong and I never got so much as a sniffle. In 2007, he told me things would simply be maintained. No growth but no fallbacks. Right again.

For 2008, with my husband in Iraq and the future seemingly scary, God whispered in my frightened ear that I was due for a year that would "grow" me. I would realize more about my strength and grow more into the woman I am destined to become. Looking back, what I went through as an individual woman, wife and American - and all that means, etc., etc. He was correct again. I never wish to relive this year, yet I'm grateful for every tear and every triumph.

Now we are on the cusp of beginning 2009. The word God is giving me is "build". Build on what I learned from 2008. Don't forget an ounce of every experience from 2008 and use it to continue the path God has intended for me.

Today I pulled four gray hairs out of my head. I used to pull only one. So put away my tweezers and made a hair appointment with Susan at ULTA. No use crying about it. Seems I've traded gray hairs for not caring as much what people think. I can always color the hairs. Last year I woke up every morning and realized that I could lose everything. In truth, all of us could lose everything at anytime. I was just not able to ignore it. God reminded me and I'm stronger for it. So I'm "building" on the Leslie Link (Leslie Mitchell) that survived 2008.

I like her.....she's cool. I look forward to seeing how this all turns out.

My best to you all in 2009

Leslie

So.....I have this 3-Tier serving display/tray thingy. I was hosting a "Christmas Brunch" for my husband Eric's family. My first ever.

A few weeks earlier I even did a recommended "trial run" of my proposed breakfast just to get the kinks out. Great idea! My Egg Bake turned out perfectly, as did my cinnamon rolls. Fresh fruit to finish. Yum. Okay...

...then I got greedy. I wanted more.

So I purchased this "impress my mother-in-law"3-Tier serving display/tray thingy. I planned the following: Level #1- Sugar cookies and well-choosen, less demented Gingerbread Men. Level #2 - My cinnamon rolls. Finally, level #3 - My husband's favorite recipe of mine: Chocolate Chip Banana Bread. Okay.

We carefully left alone 3 bananas to ripen......

Curve Ball. On December 24th it seemed that we needed to make some "last minute" purchases that we weren't expecting, and it was already 3PM. I was staring at a glass bread dish with all the bannan bread mixture put together, and the timer of the oven was beeping, letting me know that the oven was properly warmed up. Crap. I need to get everything done and don't know what the heck to do.

"I'll watch it hun," my husband said. I was nervous. "Honey, this oven seems to run hotter than our last apartments, you really gotta watch it." "No problem babe."

I feel like Eric's continuous banter of huns and babes is some odd effort to re-assure me of his capabilities. "Are you sure? Can you use the toothpick?" Blah, blah, blah...every last instruction I could throw on him. "Sure, yeah, of course babe, hun, baby hun, honey babe, blah, blah, blah."

Okay.

Well....then I got greedy.

"Can you also vaccuum and windex the bathroom mirrors? And then just do a "spot check" lifting up the toilet seats and making sure they are okay?" Got my nod and my babe-hun and I jetted out the door.

Walking up the street, through the errands, dodging piles of snow and pools of melted snow and oncoming traffic primed to hit potholes full of such snow and ick and spray me, I kept saying to myself, "have faith.....have faith....." That phrase ran through my head continuously like a holiday song, staying with me till I walked into the front door of our home an hour and a half later.

I didn't even have my key out of the door......nor did I have a full 6 inches of space into the room when I smelt it.

Our home burnt down.

"The banana bread is burnt isn't it?" I ached.

His response was shocked, sweet and sincerely innocent. "Oh you smell that? Just a little."

I dragged myself to hang up my coat, then took off my wet boots. I walked down the hallway to the kitchen.

I saw a giant steaming hockey puck of what was meant to be my 3rd tier of the perfect Christmas brunch and would make my mother-in-law fall absolutely in love with me....and if not, it would be the final "yes, this is ALL homemade" response to her routine question of, "is this homemade?"

A GIANT burnt hockey puck. Still steaming.

He set the timer and let it go.....and didn't look until the beeping reminded him. He was busy cleaning. His male sniffer only detects beef, cheese and if his Crown Royal/Coke is strong enough. EFFFER.

He did a great job on the vaccuuming and the mirrors. No one complained about the toilets.

So on Christmas Day my 3-Tier serving display/tray thingy had the following: Sugar Cookies and less-demented Gingerbread Men....cinnamon rolls.....and......more cinnamon rolls.

Merry Christmas!

Okay....so I took it a step up from the Toll House Sugar Cookie bucket-o-dough to making my own dough: Gingerbread Cookie Dough. My mom's recipe. Mom warned me of the approaching dilema with these holiday goodies....

"Gingerbread dough is really sticky (molasses) so you need a lot of flour, but not a lot of flour."

What does THAT mean?

"You'll see."

Grrr....

It means there's a reason why you can't buy Toll House Gingerbread Cookie dough in a bucket.

End result...I probably used too much flour. My Gingerbread cookies are more "cakey" than the typical/traditional crunchy "coffee dunkers" of Gingerbread Men. But that was not the problem that ultimately saddened me.

It was in the decorating.

If I could have colored my cookies in Adobe Illustrator I would have been better off. As a graphic designer by trade, I LOVE having precision in my artwork.....which has fashioned me happily into an enormous creative control freak. I desperately tried to recreate the cookies I see in fancy suburban bakeries, the ones that are part of "Christmas Cookie Bouquets". Perfect Gingerbread Men with sticks up their butts and surrounded by green and red tissue paper faned out like a seasonal peacock.

In fact, I originally thought that I could just "buy" a dozen or so of THOSE cookies, and pass them off as my own. However, my character flaw of pure honesty once confronted would surface as my mother-in-law Carol would ask on Christmas Day in her sweet Tennessee accent if these were "homemade". Busted.

If you call this cheating....I did buy the cans of colored frosting with various "tips". They suck.

Frosting came out of those cans SUPER FAST....then.....SUPER SLOW....they would ultimately BURB or FART and a GIANT WAD of colored goo would shoot out when attempting a button or a smiley face. EFFFER!!!!!

And I THOUGHT I let them dry....3 hours on the rack. Isn't that enough time? Apparently not. Once stacked, they melted....no....rather FUSSED together like a pack of crayons in the back window of a car in the burning Arizona sun.

A large, circular Tupperware full of demented Gingerbread Mr. Bills.....stacked together into a sticky gay dogpile of sugary gooey crumble sits on top of my refrigerator.

Crap.

They taste okay. After all the work I put into them I honestly can't truly tell. Eric will eat anything so he is not a good judge. After all....he ate my burnt lasagna.

Hola -

This is (to date) THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER MADE!!!!

So I am sharing with you.

Leslie's Stuffed Green Peppers

1 package ground turkey
1/2 onion
2 cups fat-free sour cream
1 cup chunky salsa
2 - 8oz cans of tomato sauce
4-6 green peppers (good size)
1 box Spanish Rice
1 tbsp garlic salt

Make the "filling"

Make the rice first....then let sit.

Brown the turkey in a good size sauce pan. Add diced onion, garlic salt and salsa.
dice the tops of the green peppers and throw that in also. Once meat is good and brown, throw in the cooked rice and simmer everything for a bit. Take off stove, once cooled, add 1 cup sour cream and one can tomato sauce. Mix all ingredients well and stuff into peppers.

mix 1 cup sour cream with last can of tomato sauce - drizzle on top on peppers before throwing in oven.

Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees....should make 4 to 6 peppers.

Delicious!

In my quest to become a good cook, I'm finding more and more that COOKING and BAKING are two incredibly separate worlds. I guess they are in the same ballpark as far as a culinary pursuit, but it's one messed up ballpark. Cooking is simmering, and slowly adding and tasting...like scoring a home run by first hitting a single, then your next at bat a double, etc., etc. It all adds up.

Baking....it's either a homerun or it's burnt to an effing crisp.

So far I burnt lasagna. Then I "underburnt" cinnamon rolls. Then with the help of my trusty crock pot I made kick ass Shepard's Pie and Chili. Last night was Stuffed Peppers. I'm feeling on a roll. However....that is "cooking".

Today in Chicago, from about 9AM on it has been snowing. Snowing well. It's 10PM now and Mr. Freezmeister is STILL committing to snowfall. I didn't work today, instead stayed in my red "Life is Good" snowman pajamas, wrote Christmas cards, wrapped Christmas presents and then dared the impossible yet what the day seemed to require.....I baked Christmas cookies.

I laid everything out like a surgeon about to operate....rolling pin, tub of sugar cookie dough, cookie cutouts of star, tree and stocking. I taped down wax paper over everything imaginable. And began rolling...

LESSON #1 - Use A LOT OF FLOUR FOR EVERYTHING.

LESSON #2 - If you roll the dough too thin you can't pick up the cookie dough cutout.

LESSON #3 - If you roll the dough thicker - you STILL CAN'T pick up the cookie dough cutout.

Eric says my stars look more like Patrick from the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons.

LESSON #4 - The directions on the recipe for how long to bake the cookies is merely a GUIDE. DO NOT WALK AWAY FROM THE OVEN ON YOUR FIRST ATTEMPT.

So instead of the cookies taking 9-11 minutes on the recipe....in my oven they take 6 minutes. Smelly lesson to learn.

But you know, I began to get the hang of it....lots of flour, cutting them thicker. I was even getting a routine where one pan of cookies went out, the other pan went in. Patrick shaped cookies began looking like stars, and the trees looked like trees. The stockings tended to burn a little more on the edges, but I think that is the shape's flaw as opposed to my own.

And the house began to smell like Sugar Cookie. And I was (and of this writing still am) wearing red "Life is Good" snowman pajamas. And in the big window, behind my Christmas tree snow is falling.

A great frosting is simply small amounts of milk added to powdered sugar till you get the consistentcy you want. I made green and a reddish pink. I got one of those mini lazy susan of candy sprinkler containers sold specifically for Christmas. I began to groove.

And finally, I followed the best advice my mom ever gave me when it came to cooking: Clean as you go.

Afterwards....I ate just one cookie and it tasted good. In a freakish way, putting all that effort into creating and decorating them made want to eat them LESS. They are art....and if I'm going to eat them now....damn it I'm going to take the same amount of time and care.

I'm going to MAKE LOVE to this Christmas Cookie. I'm going to go Barry White on this Christmas Cookie. Cause when I bite into it and savor it's taste....it's snowing, my tree is lit up, and I have my pajamas on.

I ended the evening surprising myself by making the dough for Gingerbread Men. No pre-purchased tub of dough but my mom's own recipe. The challenge continues.