Crock Pot Candy

Those of you who know me well, know that I have much love for the wonderful invention we know as a Crock Pot/Slow Cooker…whatever you may prefer to call it.  If you hang around long enough, you’ll see that I use it a lot.  If you are not utilizing one you are missing out on such convenience!  I love putting ingredients in the crock pot and knowing that in most cases I do not have to touch it again until hours later when it has dinner ready for me.  It is especially useful if you are a person who is gone several hours in the day or a busy homeschool momma like me, who is chasing kiddos all day.  With a little organization, you can put everything in your crock before leaving for the day (or before you begin your homeschool day) and then return to a hot, home-cooked meal.  Also love it when I’m cooking for a crowd.  Okay, I’ll stop singing its praises and get on with it.  I’m just always surprised when I run across people who do not have at least one in their kitchen arsenal.  I have a use for at least 3-4.  :)

                During the holidays I do a lot of baking…candy making, etc.  I feel like there are SO many recipes I want to try, and not enough time to try them all.  I also have those tried and true recipes that I return to each year that have become a must for me.  Crock pot candy is one of those.  I make it most often around Christmas and really look forward to it, because believe me when I say it is DELICIOUS!  It is essentially chocolate-covered peanuts, but they will be the best chocolate-covered peanuts you've ever put in your mouth!  :)

                You can gleam from my earlier comments that I use my crock pots a lot so once-in-a-while I wear one out.  Such was the case on Christmas Eve.  I usually put the crock pot candy in my 5 quart slow cooker.  It bit the dust that day.  In its defense, my husband and I received it as a wedding gift, so it was 9 years old.  It saw A LOT of action…. Oh, the meals it saw.  This recipe makes a ton of candy, and I had intended to give most of it away as gifts—but there was a hiccup.

                With my 5 quart crock pot out, I only have my 6 quart left (one of my sisters is borrowing my 3 ½ quart which would not have been big enough anyway).  I put everything in and went about my day.  Realized right before it finished the recipe actually calls for a 4 quart crock… and to my disappointment a lot of the peanuts had burned.  It is recommended that your crock be at least ½ to 2/3 full for optimum results, and it looked okay to me, but maybe the 6 quart was just too big.  The other issue could be…that there have been complaints from other people about my particular crock pot cooking too fast.  Thought that was crazy at first, but now I’m thinking maybe they were right.  I’ve NEVER had something burn in the crock pot until that day!  Don't let that discourage you from a crock pot...like I said, out of hundreds of meals, this is the first time something like this happened to me...and it was probably user-error on my part.  Should have known better.

                So, what do you do when you’re looking at $15-$20 of “ruined” candy?  I knew either way it had to come out of the crock pot so I decided to try to salvage what I could.  I dug out all the blackened peanuts I could get to and stirred it all up, and portioned it out on wax paper as I normally would.  It probably would have been fine to give away, even though you run across the occasional burnt peanut, but I couldn’t bring myself to gift it out.  Instead, I served it to my immediate family lol.  I gave the burnt peanut disclaimer and no one seemed to mind.  See...even with burned peanuts this is still the BEST crock pot candy.  haha

                Here is the recipe I use:

Trisha Yearwood Crock Pot Candy

                As I mentioned before this makes a TON of candy, so be prepared for that.  You could put the candy into cute cupcake liners, but I just put spoonfuls out onto wax paper and let them set up.  Here is what it looked like:

                The recipe says it makes 30-40 pieces but I got much more.  Some of my pieces are smaller, but most are mounded into huge chunks, and I still got 70 pieces of candy out of this! 

                So other than my rare crock pot malfunction this was a success.  Word to the wise—you should always give it a look if you’re able.  The recipe only cooks 3 hours so I should have glanced at it before it was finished.  Upside is, I got my crock pot candy fix, many times over.  What are your go-to convenience recipes?

Christmas Gatherings 2013 and a Happy 2014

              Christmas for my little family, like many of you, consists of several gatherings, with different groups and sides of the family in addition to our own Christmas morning traditions that we’re trying to establish.  We have had three gatherings so far, and have one more to go.  Do you find that it is hard to fit everything in?  Do you feel a pull in your heart to be all things to all people during the Christmas season?  To unknowingly spread yourself so thin trying to get to everything that it almost takes the joy out of Christmas?  Just me?  This has been us in the past.  We are trying to correct it.

              For the majority of our marriage, my husband and I lived in between our families—about 2 ½ hours from his, and 1 ½ hours from mine.  Merging our holiday traditions did not go so well.  His extended family does Christmas Eve, in the evening.  My extended family does Christmas lunch—in a different time zone that was an hour ahead of us.  Let me paint the picture:  We would leave our house in the early morning on Christmas Eve, and many times we left his area of the state (after completing 3 gatherings/visits) around 1 or 2 AM on Christmas morning, to drive the 2 ½ hours home.  We would get 3 maybe 4 hours of sleep before we had to be up and ready to walk out the door to make it the 100 + miles to my granny’s.  When did we have our Christmas you ask?  Usually had to happen Christmas Evening, or before we left for his family’s house on Christmas Eve morning...it was almost an afterthought.

The Christmas season became stressful to us, and a very sore topic, when a few months before December we had to begin discussions about our plans, and how we were going to coordinate all of it…how we were going to survive the somewhat epic two-day event that would total around 500 miles, all within a little over 24 hours.  We met the Christmas season with dread instead of joy.  

Then in 2009 we became parents.  The pressure we felt before then to try to get to everything to see everybody for Christmas pales in comparison to what it felt like once we wore the title of Mommy and Daddy.  Everyone wanted to see our little man, which we were so thankful for—but we were beginning to see at that point in our lives that something had to change.  We saw that saying ‘yes’ to being everywhere wasn't working for us…and to each their own.  Some people enjoy the hustle and bustle of it all.  They would rather go through the crazy rush to say that they were present at each of these gatherings than to skip it.  For us, it’s not that our families are any less important to us, it’s just that our priorities have changed now that we’re parents. 

To us, the most important thing is Jesus…celebrating His birth.  For me, it was hard to focus on Him being the reason for the season when I was stressed about getting all the gifts wrapped, food made and in our vehicle and to make sure we left one place in time to get to the next, and so on.  We couldn't even focus on truly enjoying our time with our family, much less thinking on Jesus.  

Our next priority is our children…and their Christmas experience.  We want to have Christmas Eve traditions in our home, and want our children to wake up in their house on Christmas morning to open gifts.  We want to read the Christmas story from the Bible as a family, have a wonderful breakfast, and if we make it to my granny’s for Christmas lunch (we live about 30 minutes from her now), great.  If we don’t, that’s okay too.  Each year since 2010, I've been employed by a church that has a late evening Christmas Eve service, so we've not been able to attend my husband’s family gathering since then.  Part of me is disappointed by that and it hurts my heart that my husband has missed it.  Part of me is thankful that we aren't rushing around as we used to.  For the past few years, we do Christmas with them the week or so after, and it has worked well. 

Maybe things will change in the future, and we’ll be able to attend Christmas Eve with my in-laws or we’ll stay in completely and not go anywhere.  I don’t know.  I do know that whatever we decide there will be zero stress involved.  I don’t want my children feeling that holiday pressure or to get the impression that Christmas equals anything but Jesus—not gifts, not food, not traveling and running around batty.  It’s not a bad thing to see family, and next to God, my husband, and children, my immediate and extended families are the most important things in the world to me.  Don’t get me wrong—I LOVE to see each of them during Christmas and making the decision to dial back what we do during the holidays has not been an easy one, and goes against my nature, especially since it is usually the only time we’re all together during the year.  However, I believe what I’m teaching my children is more important, and will shape the way they look at the Christmas season in the future.  We may have close to the same number of gatherings during Christmas—but they are more spread out, and definitely a lot easier to get through.  I know that we definitely enjoy this time of year a lot more now than earlier in our marriage. 

We were able to have my immediate family in our home for Christmas on the 28^th, and I LOVED the feeling of them being here.  I did a double batch of Hot Chocolate in the crock pot, which was a huge hit with the kiddos!  Want to try it?

Casey’s Crock Pot Hot Chocolate

Ingredients:

15 cups water

2 large cans Sweetened Condensed Milk

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

3 tsp vanilla extract

1 cinnamon stick

Marshmallows, whipped cream, or whatever you like to put in your hot chocolate.

Directions:

In a 5-6 quart crock pot combine water, sweetened condensed milk and vanilla.  Add cocoa powder and cinnamon stick if desired.  Stir.  Cook on low setting 4 hours, stirring every hour.  Serve hot.  Can hold on warm setting for an hour.  Top with marshmallows, whipped cream, or any add-in that you desire.  NOTE:  the cinnamon stick is optional, but I highly recommend it.  It gave a great depth to the hot chocolate. You could easily cut this recipe in half and prepare it in a 3-4 quart crock pot.  There were 11 of us and most of us had 2 or 3 mugs, and I had some left over, which I have enjoyed. :) 

We rang in the New Year pretty mildly—home together on the couch.  2013 wasn’t the best year for us…it was down right ROUGH at times.  It contained a lot of good—but a lot of things I’m ready to forget about and move on from.  It is my hope and prayer that 2014 is much better.  If 2013 wasn’t a great year for you, trust in the Lord for, “…we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose,” Romans 8:28 (NIV). Whatever the new year brings for you, remember that putting Him first is always the way to start.  Matthew 6:33 (NIV) says, “But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Love and blessings to each of you!

Christmas Tree 2013

My little family has moved twice since February of this year.  I’ve learned a few things in those experiences:

1. Our “stuff” multiplied exponentially after we had kids.
2. We have WAY too much “stuff.”
3. I have stellar spatial reasoning skills and can pack a box like a sardine can with way more than you might think would fit. :)
4. You should always pack a suitcase of what you and your family will need immediately—changes of clothes, toiletries, and night-time essentials for your kiddos (we have special books and snuggly toys for bedtime).  I also packed a special box of things I would need for my job, or my hubby would need for school, since he is a fulltime college student.
5. Always…always label what is in your boxes.  If you don’t it will come back to bite you in the rear—learned this during move #2 of this year.
6. I hate the task of going through everything I (and my family) own and deciding what stay and what goes.
7. I hate moving…period.

Before these past two moves, we had lived in our home since 2005, so other than the home I grew up in as a child, the almost 8 years we spent in our first house as a married couple is the longest I’ve lived in one place.  You accumulate a lot of stuff when you live in the same place.  Once we had children, it’s as if it doubled.  Where does all this stuff come from?  We were in need of a major purge of the things we owned before the first move, however, it just brought it to light, and what an overwhelming experience that was. 

Aside from all of that, as I said in point #7, I hate moving.  Each…and…every…part.  I hate having to deal with what you’re giving away or selling;  I hate boxing things up, and taking them out, and trying to decide where they are going to “live” in the new place.  More than anything, I despise the chaotic feeling I have, not being able to find exactly what I need, when I need it, and having to spend extra time searching for stuff after a move.  It’s the displaced feeling I get that unnerves me, and not being surrounding by the things I need to function.  I know, I know, first-world problems. 

During our first move this year, our children were 3 and 16 months old, and they would literally come behind me after I had filled a box, and take it all out.  It was two steps forward and five steps back.  Unpacking with small children is quite the same—you can’t accomplish much at once.  Perhaps this is just me.  Back to the first move:

We moved in a whirlwind and just moved the things in our home, and were not able to deal with our storage unit in that town.  We moved 2+ hours away and thought we would be able to move everything out of the unit soon.  So, when we arrived at the first new place, being totally overwhelmed by the number of boxes in our home, I was looking for anything that did not “have to” be with us.  We had move from a house to a duplex, and although it was a fairly large place, it was still quite smaller than our house so again, I knew something had to go.  Therefore during one of our trips back to the original house to get more stuff out, I told my husband to load up all of our Christmas decorations and we would put them in storage since we didn’t “have to” have them right now.  All the while thinking we would not still be dealing with a storage unit come December.

Fast-forward to present day and a second move later:  Still haven’t been able to clear out our storage unit, and our Christmas decorations are still 100 miles away.   Only problem now is I need them…and don’t have the money to make the trip to go get them.  As December was approaching and I came to this realization I was heartbroken.  This is the first Christmas we have had since the two moves.  We are in a house now, and I was so looking forward to decorating this place from top to bottom.  It was hard for me when I realized that would not happen.  However, I am humbled that God cares about the little details of our lives.  I remembered last week that when we first moved to this house in August, one of my sisters asked me if I wanted an extra Christmas tree that her mother-in-law was giving away.  In my head, I was thinking ‘yes—I’ll put one up stairs and one downstairs,’ however, as it turns out, this one will be our only tree this year, and I am oh so grateful.  Christmas is about Jesus, pure and simple, but it just doesn’t feel like Christmas to me until our tree is up. 

I purchased some shatterproof ornaments and we decorated it on the 13^th.  My children were enamored with the process.  There were lots of “ooo’s and ahh’s” when they saw the lights and had the chance to put on ornaments.  My children are now 2 and 4, and so there were a few chaotic moments...but what sweet memories.  My little man helped Daddy get the tree out of the box and danced around to the Christmas music playing; the princess dumped all the ornaments out on the floor at least twice (notice I mentioned I bought shatterproof lol).  She also kept stacking ornaments on the tree branches before I had a chance to put hooks in them…then once they were on the tree she wanted to take them off and do it again. 

It is by far the most simple and barely decorated tree I’ve ever had.  It does make me a little sad that our special ornaments (such as the one we have from the year we got married—or the kid’s first ornaments) are not on there, but again, I am so blessed that God knows everything.  I am blessed that in August, He knew I would not have access to my Christmas decorations in December, and that He provided what I needed.  I am blessed that He cares about my little heart, and the happiness it brings me to sit in our living room that is lit only by our tree.  It will be a Christmas different from any other…being in a new place for the first time since 2005…but I’m thankful for the simple reminder that Christmas is not “things” and that in most every situation, it is what you make of it.  I can be upset about things not being exactly the way I would like them to be, or I can choose to see how it worked out better than I could have imagined.  What has made this Christmas season special for you?