Christmas treats for friends and neighbors

For years now, we’ve been looking for our Christmas gift niche. The one thing we could make that would be signature and have people angling to be added to our list to get their hands on our special family [fill in the blank]. We know one family who makes a highly coveted salsa, another that makes tamales, another makes homemade toffee, and my mother-in-law Sally compiles cookie plates on a different fancy Christmas plate every year. Her neighbors now have quite a collection of Christmas dishes.

I make a really good tomato chutney, but that didn’t seem to be universally appealing. If you like tomatoes, you’d definitely be hunting for it, but if they’re not your thing then there’s not much else to recommend it. We’ve also experimented with bread, but that took way too long. We needed something that could be made in bulk. I think we’ve finally hit upon it this year.

Bear did most of the work on this duo of sauces. We got both the recipes out of this book (which is freaking amazing. Best money I ever spent. EVER. Buy the book and a kitchen scale and amaze all your friends at your virtuosity in the kitchen.) and then toyed with the proportions a little bit to get the right balance between sweet and either tart or bitter.

They maybe don’t look super appetizing here (my kitchen briefly looked like a very unfortunate CSI lab tech worked there) but they are crazy delicious. Blow your mind and lick the bottle clean fantastic.

While Bear was whisking the night away, I was clicking around between Word and Photoshop making these cute little tags and labels. Pretty labels just make me inordinately happy.

We were both working away with the baby napping upstairs and Christmas music playing over the internet, Christmas lights on and the whole house smelling like cocoa powder. What a perfect way to spend a Christmas weekend.