Today Holidailies has a request: Share a favorite recipe that you like to make (or persuade someone to make for you) at this time of year.
This isn’t holiday-related, but it is a favorite cold-weather meal and it’s the easiest thing to make: Grandma’s Slow Cooker Vegetarian Chili, on AllRecipes. You basically gather the ingredients, dump them all into a slow-cooker, and let it cook for two hours. I don’t want to violate any copyrights, so I won’t post the ingredients here, but trust me, this is savory scrumptiousness and it will fill you up. I tinker with the amount of chili powder depending on my mood, and dice up a half or whole jalapeno and throw it in if I want a little more heat, but other than that, this recipe is perfect, and it will make your home smell warm and spicy on a cold winter’s night.
If you’d like to add a simple dessert, spicy chocolate fudge is a good pairing, although this recipe is not vegan as it has condensed milk and some milk chocolate chips. I make it without nuts. There are two camps of fudge aficionado, pro-nut and anti-nut, and I am firmly in the anti-nut camp.
This YouTuber stopped posting seven years ago, and I miss her. She had some hilarious videos. One of my buddies originally found a personal video of hers in which she wishes someone with my name a happy birthday and then at the end says “don’t be fresh.” From there it just took off and we still laugh about it to this day.
If you’re a foodie, you might appreciate these next few videos. They always make me laugh because they’re just so true.
And my favorite, which is so Gen-X in attitude, I can’t help but love it.
That’s right. You’re not special.
Diana, whatever you’re up to now, I hope life is treating you well. Thank you for keeping your wonderfully sassy channel with all of its amazing recipes.
And now for tonight’s ornament, another new one.
Cute little penguin, eh? I think my mother would have appreciated it. She loved penguins—although she didn’t quite understand them until late in her life. On one of my visits we were watching a documentary on them, and in one segment some Emperor Penguins approached the camera crew.
“You’re KIDDING,” she said. “Oh, I don’t believe it.”
“What?”
“I thought they were taller than that.”
“I dunno. Those are pretty big for penguins,” I said. “What did the guy say, three and a half to four feet? How tall did you think they were?”
“Like your father.”
My father and I looked at each other and just lost it. He was 6’1″.
“What?” she said. “It’s not like you ever see them standing next to anything in a picture so you can tell.”
Gotta admit, she had a point. But we never let her live it down after that. At Christmas I gave her a calendar of penguins, and my father held it up in front of his face and waddled around. “Look at me, the six-foot penguin!”
They weren’t perfect and they didn’t always get along, but one of the best things I can say about my parents is that they were never boring. He was an artist and one of the original MadMen. No joke, he worked for McCann, the agency AMC based the series on, at that time in its history. She was a civil servant who loved to write and originally wanted to be a journalist before I came along as an iltatähti and wrecked it all for her. (I like the Finnish term for late-life baby, meaning “evening star,” much better than the American “oops baby,” “mistake,” or “accident.”) He was Greatest Generation, she was early Silent, and we grew up with Big Band, war stories, New York sarcasm, a cookie-cutter house bought on the GI Bill after WWII, dogs, cats, and of course, “rules are rules, you’re not special.”
But that’s what made it all special.
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