Pecan Pretzels

Here is a great recipe for holiday gatherings. It is fast and takes just a few ingredients.

And it is simple enough for children to help!

You will need mini-pretzels, Rolo candy, and pecan halves.
You will need equal amounts of each ingredient
Place pretzels in a single layer on a cookie sheet
Put one Rolo on each pretzel.

When each pretzel has a Rolo on top, place in oven at 250 degrees and heat for 2-3 minutes

After cooking, the Rolo should still hold its shape, not look melted, but be soft to the touch.
Press a pecan half onto the top of each warm Rolo, flattening out the Rolo.

Let cool before eating (if you can!). Don't eat too many!

Cookie Turkeys

These turkeys are great edible decorations, easy enough

for children to make. You will need:

chocolate cookie wafers

chocolate frosting

gum drops

chocolate chips

red hots or mini M & Ms

candy corn

The grocery store sells these wafers in the cookie section

Cut a piece off the bottom of a cookie with a sharp knife.

Frost one cut cookie and one uncut cookie. Use enough frosting

so that everything sticks together.

Place the cut side of the cookie toward the back of the round cookie and put a gum drop

for the body in front

Stick on a chocolate chip for the head, using frosting. I usually use a semi sweet chip,

today I had butterscotch.

Put a red hot beneath the chocolate chip for the waddle, again using frosting to stick it on.

Add candy corn to the cut, upright cookie for feathers

Let your turkey sit for awhile to firm up the frosting.

Make enough for everyone!

Pumpkin Dinner Rolls

Many pumpkin recipes seem to come in the form of a dessert. Pumpkin is a mild vegetable that adds texture, delicate flavor, and wonderful nutrition to all sorts of foods.

This is a recipe for dinner rolls that uses the puree from a recent post. You can use canned pumpkin if you want to.

Pumpkin Dinner Rolls
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup warm water
2 cups warm milk (warm the water and the milk to help the yeast grow)
1/4 cup butter, softened or melted
2 cups cooked pumpkin, from a can or homemade
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup wheat germ
10-12 cups flour
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon yeast
Mix sugar, water, milk, butter, pumpkin, salt. Add wheat germ, 7-8 cups of flour, yeast, mix well. Continue adding flour, using your mixer if it can handle it, or by hand if your mixer can't, kneading 8-10 mintues until dough is elastic but not sticky.


Place in greased bowl, turning once to grease all sides.


Cover with towel and place in a warm place for about an hour.

When your dough has doubled in size, punch down, divide into 3rds,
and divide each 3rd into 16ths.

Form each piece into a ball and place on a greased cookie sheet.
Allow to almost double again, about 30 minutes.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-18 minutes, until tops are golden brown.

Serve with butter, or eat these moist, delicious rolls plain.

I am Thankful For.....

My family had a Thanksgiving tradition when our children were growing up. Every year a few weeks before Thanksgiving, we begin to keep a "thankful bag". I had a brown paper bag that my children decorated to look like a turkey, but you could use any container you want.

Starting early in November we would take a few minutes at the supper table and each family member would write down why they were thankful for a particular child in the family. Each night we would choose a different child until each child had been our "thankful child" two or three times.

We would put the paper slips into the bag and the Family Home Evening night before Thanksgiving Dad would pull the slips out of the bag, one by one, and read them aloud. It was always fun to read what the children had written, and even funner to listen to when the comment was about YOU. Even the smallest children participated, having Mom or Dad write their answer for them. We found that if we focused on one child each night, each child would end up with an equal number of comments.

Making Pumpkin Puree

It's the time of the year to bake pumpkin dishes! Making pumpkin puree is easy and cheap, and there are many methods. These are the instructions to make puree from a whole pumpkin. You can use it the same way you would use pumpkin from a can. Here's how to make puree:

Choose a smallish, dense pumpkin. "Sugar baby" is a good variety

to make into puree.

Pierce the skin with a sharp knife, making sure to go all the way through the skin and meat of the pumpkin. This allows steam to escape when baking.


Place pierced pumpkin in about 1 inch of water in a pan.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 1 1/2 hours.

Cool; cut the top off of the pumpkin.


Scoop out the seeds and pulp, discard.

Scoop out the soft part of the pumpkin and place in your food processor bowl. Pulse until smooth. Before I owned a food processor, I used an electric mixer for this step.

The small pumpkin (about 8" in diameter) I used made slightly more than 2 cups of puree. Homemade puree is generally lighter in color then canned pumpkin. The puree should be refridgerated and used within a day or two, or frozen for up to a month. Substitute the puree for canned pumpkin in your recipes. One 15-16 oz can of pumpkin equals

2 cups of puree.

Registering in the New Family Search Program

The Stake would like to encourage everyone to register in the new family search program. Here are the instructions:

1. Get confirmation date and membership record number from your ward clerk.
2. Log on to new family search website from your internet explorer: new.familysearch.org
3. Register on the wesite under the "register for the new Family Search".
4. Create a username and password.
5. Write down and place your username and password in a safe place. It is somewhat challenging to get your username and password if you have misplaced them. Both username and password are case sensitive (meaning it matters if you capitalize or not).
6. Once you have registered, browse the new familysearch website.
7. You will notice that quite a bit of information is missing. No information on living individuals will be there yet unless someone has already input the information in the new family search program. In the future you will learn how to find and input information.
8. Notify your ward family history consultant and high priest group leader when you have registered.