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Help your family get into a festive mood this Christmas by working a little holiday music into your Christmas traditions. There are a number of different ways you can encourage your family to enjoy the sounds of the holiday season. For some suggestions, visit the Christmas Music blog.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make traditional eggnog (alcohol and all), you’ll love this video. In it, professional culinary instructor Louis Ortiz shows you step by step how to make a creamy, smooth eggnog you and your holiday guests will enjoy.

Once you’ve decided that you want to start “freezer cooking,” you’re probably wondering where to start. First, you’ll need to sit down and choose the month’s worth of recipes. You don’t need 30 different recipes though–10 should be enough to keep the variety while keeping the complications to a minimum. You’ll only have to repeat a recipe 3 times during the month, and chances are you do that anyway if you already cook at home and have certain family “favorites” that find their way into the menu at least once a week.

There are certain things that don’t freeze well, though, so you might want to reconsider recipes that include pasta, potatoes, mayonnaise, flour, or cornstarch. Pasta and potatoes get mushy when frozen, while mayo, flour, and cornstarch will separate and develop a strange texture. You can also modify the recipe so you can add these items during your final cooking process, if you wish.

Choose your recipes based on that week’s grocery store sale items, as well as things that have a lot of common ingredients, to speed up your cooking process. Once you have your recipes selected, make a list of necessary ingredients, and go to your pantry to find what you already have. Cross off what’s on hand, and go to the store and buy the rest.

Once you have all of your ingredients, you’re ready to start cooking. Set aside a day that you can spend several hours in the kitchen, focusing on meal assembly. (Seem like a lot to ask? Think of those 29 nights off you’re about to get!)  If you need a lot of browned ground beef, brown it all at once to save time and keep from dirtying too many pans. Chop all of your vegetables at once and put them into bowls so they’re handy for the assembly process. Don’t cook things like casseroles and stews before you freeze them, though, or they won’t turn out as tasty as you might be expecting.

Assembling the recipes is the next step. You may need to buy some extra freezer and oven safe casserole dishes to make your freezer cooking process easier. Buy the same dish, so they’ll stack neatly in the freezer. After recipes are assembled, label them clearly with the name of the dish and the date it was frozen, and don’t forget to “rotate” your freezer inventory to reduce waste. First in, first out.

Now, you have a whole month of meals in the freezer for your family. All you have to do is defrost, and pop them in the oven, skillet, or pot, and dinner is done.

Cooking your family’s meals is a daily activity throughout the year that can be a significant stressor if you have a tight schedule. Running here, there, and everywhere in the evenings can leave us all a little time crunched when it comes to putting dinner together, and makes you want to hit the drive-through–an unhealthy and costly habit.

But you don’t have to spend an hour in the kitchen every evening cooking dinner. Just imagine being able to put a casserole or a stew in the refrigerator to thaw every evening for the next night’s dinner. Your cooking can be that easy, if you jump on the “freezer cooking” bandwagon.

Freezer cooking has become popular in recent years, as families’ schedules become more and more stuffed. There are many different strategies to freezer cooking, but the most popular is to put together 30 days worth of meals in one day to freeze–otherwise known as the Once a Month Cook.

It might sound overwhelming to think of putting together 30 meals in one day, but it doesn’t have to be. First, remember that they don’t have to be 30 different meals. You can repeat the same meal 3 or 4 times, saving you time and still giving your family variety. You can also cook common ingredients all at once to use in several recipes, such as browned ground beef, sautéed onions, chopped vegetables, etc. Rather than spending time chopping and browning when you are assembling each individual recipe, do it all at once. To make this easier, choose recipes that have a lot of common ingredients.

In part 2 of this series of posts, we’ll look at the specific steps to creating an organized cooking day that will save you time and money all month long.

Need a great gift idea for a teenager? Teens can be very difficult to buy for, since their interests are always changing. But there are a few “universal” gifts out there that any teenager would like. ChristmasGiftIdeas.info has some great gift ideas for teens and suggestions on coming up with the perfect gift for any teenager.

I can remember every Christmas growing up, my mom would cook up a batch of Cowboy Cookies to share. These cookies were a mainstay in almost any of our family gatherings. Cowboy Cookies are a twist on the classic chocolate chip cookie, created by adding chocolate chips to a crunchy, semi-sweet oatmeal cookie. We hope you’ll enjoy this recipe just as much as our family has.

Here’s the recipe:

1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup Crisco
2 eggs
2 cups white all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups quick oats
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (6 oz.)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Beat white sugar, brown sugar, and shortening in large mixing bowl on high speed.

Add eggs and beat thoroughly. Combine flour, baking soda, salt and baking powder and stir into sugar-egg mixture. Stir in oats, chocolate chips and vanilla. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 – 10 minutes.

Yields about 6 dozen cookies.

If you want to get a head start on your Christmas party planning, finding recipes is a good place to start. Taste of Home, a group of several magazines that focus on recipes, offers a web site that is devoted to Christmas recipes, along with decorating and entertaining ideas. There’s even an article on eating light for the holidays and planning a menu that will pack in the flavor without packing on the pounds.

If you watched television or used the internet at all during Christmas 2005, chances are that you saw the incredible Christmas display designed by Carson Williams of Mason, Ohio. Williams is an electrical engineer who spent two months and $10,000 creating a beautiful light display at his home, synchronized to the song “Wizards in Winter” by Transiberian Orchestra.  After a video of his light display was posted on YouTube, Williams became an overnight sensation, with millions of YouTube hits, an appearance on the Today Show and in a Miller Lite commercial, and traffic accidents in his neighborhood as people within driving distance flocked to see the display themselves. Sadly, all of the traffic ended up forcing him to shut his display down. The light display was replicated the next year on a facade of his home in a local park, but they charged admission, and it just wasn’t quite the same.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out…if you have, here’s a blast from the (recent) past.

Is the word Xmas a sacrilegious abbreviation for Christmas? According to the Christmas Myths blog, this is a pervasive myth because the origin of the abbreviation comes from the Greek language, which the majority of American Christmas are unfamiliar with.  Visit their blog to learn more about the origin of this 400-year-old abbreviation for Christmas.

After years of falling into disrepair, the house that “A Christmas Story” was filmed in was purchased in 2004 by a fan of the film who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring it to its original splendor and turning it into the ultimate museum for fans of the famous Christmas movie. There’s even a leg lamp displayed prominently in the front window, and each room looks exactly as it did in the film.  After opening as a museum in 2006, the “A Christmas Story” house recently welcomed its 100,000th visitor, who won a leg lamp of his own.