Cookies and more cookies

Hi from Ten Gables,

I have been in the kitchen today baking cookies! At Christmas, I like to give special people a tin of cookies, so I thought I had better get started. One of my good friends is heading North to Tennessee for Christmas, so I took her a box of cookies today to munch along the way.

I made crisp sugar cookies, chocolate-peanut stovetop cookies, and orange cookies. I have lots of oranges from our fruit trees, so the orange cookies call for juice plus grated orange peel plus candied orange slices. They are sort of a cake-like cookies good with hot tea.

After all the baking, I went outside and it is a glorious day with bright sunshine and temperatures in the high sixties, so very nice. It is supposed to hit 80 this week end, so we have had extremes on both ends this week. I assessed the damages of the freeze and I lost the basil plants, tomatoes and marigolds. The cabbage is good, but I see a few pests are appearing, so I dusted the bottom leaves with Sevin. The broccoli still looks good and the radishes are getting big. The hibiscus, bougainvillea and other things look good, so it wasn't too bad. However, next week the forcast is for more cold. As the old song used to say, "What will be, will be"! Have a great day.