Cookies! (Recipe Included)

 

From "Christmas Cookies" by George Strait

I saw a meme last week that says every recipe blog starts off with how the blogger was out for a wintery walk and it reminded them of tobogganing as a child and yadda yadda yadda and the poster just wanted to hurry up and get to the recipe and who cares about the other stuff.  While I do feel the pain of having to navigate all that nonsense to get to the real information, I think we all want to share our warm fuzzy memories of the season with our readers, family and friends.

There's a Roughrider fan in every crowd!

Some of my fondest Christmas memories are of my Mom and me baking cookies. I remember having to kneel on a kitchen chair at the cupboard and watching with wild anticipation as Mom would roll out the dough and then we'd choose just the exactly right cookie cutters.  I was really blessed to have a childhood which contains sweet memories like these.  I was equally fortunate to have a niece and nephew who I was close to, so when I was older and married, I'd invite them to my house to make cookies.  One year in particular, my niece was sick and couldn't come for cookie decorating so my nephew and I did it but put some aside in a special care package to take to her.  She proclaimed that the Christmas cookies held special healing powers because upon eating them she immediately was feeling better.

Jingling Rider Fan Medicine Woman.

Flash forward to when I became a more enthusiastic Saskatchewan Roughrider fan.  I purchased a set of Wilton Football Themed cookie cutters.  The set includes shapes for pennants, footballs, jerseys and helmets.  I only used the jerseys and helmets pictured below, although the recipe, which is coming up soon, makes enough cookies for the whole neighbourhood and then some so you can use your whole array of cookie cutters.  I do have a very extensive collection from all the obvious Christmas shapes to Snoopy and that cute truck with a tree in the back.  Of course, you may already have your own favourite sugar cookie recipe, or you might not have the time to make it and in that case the cookie dough in the cooler section will do just fine.

Makes 5 dozen cookies

Without dragging it out farther... here is the recipe for Mom's Sugar Cookies.  There aren't any special instructions except throw it all in a mixer to combine.  Form it into a roll, wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.  If you don't refrigerate the dough, it will be pretty much disastrous and frustrating as the dough won't be able to be worked with.  Roll out the dough and cut into shapes, football themed or otherwise and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 8 minutes.  I use silicon mats on my baking sheets, so the cookies don't get overly brown and so cleanup is a snap.  One substitution you can make is the butter/shortening.  You can use margarine instead and the recipe still turns out wonderfully.

Once the cookies are completely cooled you can frost them with your favourite method.  Back as a kid we'd just use your regular butter cream homemade frosting with a myriad of sprinkles.  These days because my Hubby calls sprinkles "gravel" I bypass that method.  One year I purchased Cakemate Cookie Icing in various colours and although it didn't turn out to be my favourite product the cookies turned out pretty and tasty.

Go Riders!

Another year, I coated the cookies in white frosting and then used food markers to decorate.  These turned out to be my favourite cookies although the process was very time consuming because the markers had to dry completely, or they'd smudge.  That was also the year, where Hubby didn't know of how I'd toiled over the cookies and a good portion of them had "disappeared" before I'd found out.  

The table display for New Years Eve 2019

Maybe you want to make a batch of these for your favourite Riders fan or just make some sweet memories with some close family members.  I hope this blog was enjoyable to read and if it was, please share it with others on your Christmas list.  Nothing says love like a homemade gift-wrapped stack of sugar cookies shared with your family and friends.

Oh Snap! Looks pretty happy for a guy who just lost a leg!

CFL Advent Calendar

Fridays around here are either for football or flashbacks and sometimes it's both!  I've had a flood of ideas recently and I was thinking about a post I wrote called CFL Subscription Club on ABC Football.  The entire blog is talking about how you can subscribe to all kinds of services to bring you monthly boxes of anything from food to underwear and my argument was why doesn't one exist for the CFL?  Well, since it's Christmas, this got me thinking, (by the time you read this I'll already be into my advent calendars) why doesn't a football, a CFL in particular, advent calendar exist?

Well, likely because no one in marketing has thought of it.

* crickets * - CFL marketing department probably.

Imagine, as Grey Cup hysteria winds down, that you could purchase a CFL advent calendar.  24 days of CFL football items behind little doors of some kind of football themed box.  Hey, I can't have allll the ideas now, can I?  I'm not talking about big ticket items, but I know for a fact that the Roughrider Store has pins, stickers, tattoos, earrings, keychains, Christmas ornaments and likely other small items which would tuck very nicely into a decorative box.  December 1st you scramble over to your CFL advent, peel back the door and reveal...

With my luck it would be a Blue Bomber pin.

Every person who purchased an advent calendar would end up with a nice collection of memorabilia from all 9 CFL teams.  The items could be traded on social media and Facebook groups.  Fans could wear their items to events for the upcoming season. 

"Hey, where did you get that cool Gainer pin?" 

"Oh, it was in my CFL advent calendar!"  

The entire Christmas Countdown calendar would culminate in day 24 where there could be a coupon to be redeemed in team stores!  Then every fan could flock to their local team CFL store on Boxing Day to purchase an item of their wildest dreams.

* sigh *

My little green Roughrider heart swells with the thought of it.  Let's face it, there hasn't been much for us Rider fans to be excited about this last year.  It's too late for this year of course with Christmas already a couple weeks away, but hey, CFL get with it - get with the times.

Something like this could be marketed for the countdown to the 2023 CFL season and debuted during training camp and then the 24th door of the calendar would coincide with the home opening weekends...

...but I'm just the ideas person.  Just a fan.  Just a girl writing little ol blogs - wishing there was something football related to go with her tea and jam Advent Calendars.

Any Way The Wind Blows

There hasn't been much going on in the CFL lately.  Pieces of news have been few and far between.  They've resorted to articles about players pets and who can be named best dressed CFLer.

Meanwhile...

* crickets *

...a dog barks in the distance...

🎵 a birdie chirps...

With this lull in activity every off season I find that my own rabid fan status wains and I wonder over to other activities and my influences change.  Some people turn to other sports - Saskatoon Rush, Nascar and hockey of course. Many of you haven't known me a long time but March seems to be a time for when I explore.  There was the Dean Martin infatuation of 20-something.  We won't discuss the whole vampire thing. Last year I researched my family tree and actually found a cousin living in Montreal who I didn't know existed. This off season was going along like normal and then in February I watched (finally) Bohemian Rhapsody and it seemed like everything changed for me.

I've made no secret that while I write this blog and am administrator for ABC Rider Fans, that in "real life" I am a piano teacher.  While I've always maintained that music is what I do - it's not my life...it's an illusion because it really does consume my life.   Where I am able to strike a balance is that I only teach after school hours so while you are likely gearing up to go home after your work day, I am gearing up to start teaching.  'Tis the life of a musician I suppose.  What these hours allow me to do is follow football during those off times except when I need to do research or find music or actually come up with a plan or strategy for my lessons, which by the way is unpaid time but I'm dedicated and I do it happily.

So there I was coasting through CFL off season and coping with some other health things that always seem to crop up at this time of year but you know everyone has "stuff" to deal with.  One of my students...my best student if I'm honest (and fav but don't tell the others!), is playing Bohemian Rhapsody for the SAM music festival in May which runs close if not at the same time as Roughrider training camp.  We had decided on this selection before Christmas so it had nothing to do with my off season doldrums but everything to do with the reason one quiet Saturday night I decided I should watch the movie.  I called it Professional Development. I actually streamed A Star is Born the same night but for whatever reason (I'm heartless?) it had zero effect on me, yet the story of Freddie Mercury made me feel a whole myriad of things that I can't even begin to sort out or explain in any form.

I was 18 when Mercury died from Aids in 1991 and when I think back to "me" back then I often refer to myself as a stupid teenager.  Maybe I was just oblivious? I remember the news but life went on.  I didn't realize until now how excruciating that event actually was.  Is it possible to mourn someone nearly 30 years later?  Well just like I seem to be stuck in this musical cycle, many football fans are stuck as well.  Bring back Dressler is one of the newest cries.  When will Rider fans move on?  Are we still in 2009 mourning too?  The Roughriders need to continue to move on to the future instead of looking back.  Unlike, Queen's front man, most football players are replaceable even if we've loved their character and personality.  To everything there is a season.  The show must go on.

With most things in my life even when I don't think music plays a roll it's there in the background noise.  If you're still with me here and wondering what any of this has to do with the football blog you've grown used to reading well it made me realize how much I've grown in all ways and continue to evolve and how fortunate...blessed really, I am to have a slightly successful page which is somewhat accepted by a mostly male dominated sort of hobby and industry.  No one ever told me I couldn't and I always knew I could do things, mostly artistic types of things with extreme ease.  I can do anything! I've often said. So while Roughrider football is an obsession in my life, music is a thread weaving itself deeply through it.  A team wins a championship - We Are The Champions.  A Calgary Stampeders game comes to an end - Sweet Caroline.  The Saskatchewan Roughriders score a touchdown - Green is the Colour.

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When the city of Regina hosted the 2013 Grey Cup they knocked the halftime show out of the park by having flying snowmobiles and a rocking Hedley (at the time) group.  Randy Ambrosie said that the Riders pitch was so good they could have landed the Olympics so naturally that makes me question what kind of half time show was pitched.  Does the halftime show need to be Canadian or should they reach farther into the stars to bring the most epic halftime ever?  Can both be done?  What's your opinion on this and who would you like to see as the 2020 halftime show? 

This time of year - March, the cold snap finally comes to an end and we are looking for signs of life.  While it'll be a while until we see daffodils here in Saskatchewan, birds are returning and the snow is sinking as the sun grows higher and higher in the sky.  Our beloved CFL teams will be re-awakening after all the moves in free agency.  The CFLPA negotiations will get settled.  Soon it'll be draft day. Some people are already looking forward and talking about training camp in Saskatoon.  Our passion is renewed.  The season is renewed.  We feel anew.

I'm ready for the next chapter.

Go Riders.