On the 2nd Day of Christmas- “It’s a Wonderful Life”

December 16, 2011

On the second day of our 12 days of Christmas movie fun we watched It’s a Wonderful Life. This is such a great holiday film. Matt and I watched it on our first Christmas married in Cloudcroft in my first white Christmas ever—- ahhhhh I know!

I found a cute article from Oprah suggesting how to throw a It’s Wonderful Life Party. I should have read more carefully, because I should have made mulled wine instead of cider. Oh well. Cider is so tasty! I used Jaime Oliver’s as a guide – but did not have star anise or pomegranates. It was still super tasty. It was also sweet because we had cider that first year too.

To go along with the angel getting its wings when a bell rings I thought I would use bell peppers. This was quite funny to explain to my personal trainer. First of all the play on word was lost since in New Zealand call them capsicums. I ftold her thought I might stuff them, and she said that the loved them stuffed with mint. I said mint?! really? What she really said was mince (whoops!). I had forgotten that is ground meat. Who knew it would take 10 minutes to explain a simple dish in english to each other. I ended up making a bell pepper, caramelized onion, mushroom, and emmental cheese focaccia bread for dinner. I used the Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread mix I made earlier in the week. I made a beautiful focaccia, but not a normal pizza crust.

The big experiment of the night was the “healthy sugar cookies“. I recently bought The Real Food Diet by Dr Josh Axe due to its high review on Amazon. He kept sing the high praises of coconut oil. All I remember about coconut oil was how I shouldn’t eat movie popcorn because of how many calories it had if I remember correctly. He says that the “fatty acids are useful in combatting antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses.” As sickly as I am that has to be a good thing, so I though what the hell when I saw a vegan blog for healthy sugar cookies. Chocolate-Covered Katie is a girl we all should hate. She works at keeping weight on, but, I can’t hate this recipe for sugar cookies. I did use the coconut oil for the vegan butter sub. and I used real milk as I am not a vegan, but HELL they were good. I will try more of here recipes when I need to bake. They were sweet with out a ton of sugar. They felt a bit like play-dough, but they tasted like real sugar cookies.