Now that Hostess seems to be gone from our world, I thought someone might want these recipes: Homemade Twinkies recipe: Recipe adapted from TLC Ingredients For the cake: 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup brown sugar 2 eggs 1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 cup milk 1/3 cup canola oil 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla For the filling: 1/3 cup shortening 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/4 cup light cream 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar Directions: 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease three mini loaf pans with cooking spray. 2. Beat the eggs and sugar with a handheld mixer until thick. Slowly add in all other ingredients and beat until fully combined. Divide the batter among the mini loaf pans, filling about 3/4 full. Bake cakes for at least an hour, or until golden brown. Cool in pans and then transfer to a wire cooling rack. 3. While cakes cook, prepare filling by mixing shortening, sugar, vanilla and light cream with a hand mixer. Once mixed, slowly add in sugar and beat until combined. Fill a pastry bag with frosting and cut a small hole. 4. Once cakes have cooled, carefully poke three holes in the bottom of the cakes. Pipe frosting into the holes until just filled. Cool for at least 20 minutes and enjoy! __________________ Homemade Sno Balls recipe: Makes 2 dozen Ingredients For the cake: 1 stick butter, unsalted 2 cups sugar 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 cups flour 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder 2 teaspoons baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1-1/2 cups 1 percent milk For frosting: 6 egg whites, warm 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1-1/2 cups sugar 1/3 cup water, room temperature 2 teaspoons vanilla 3 cups coconut flakes 2 - 3 drops red food coloring Directions: 1. For the cake: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a muffin pan with cooking spray. Cream the butter and sugar together with a hand-held mixer until combined; add eggs, one at a time. Mix in vanilla. In another bowl, mix together dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until there are no streaks of flour. Fill muffin pan cavities 3/4 full and bake for 15 minutes. Cool on a wire cooling rack. Once cakes are cooking, cut out a small cone from the bottom, discarding the triangle portion but keeping the small cake circle. (This is where the filling will be piped). 2. To prepare the filling/frosting: Beat egg whites until peaks form, about four minutes. In a saucepan, heat sugar, water and cream of tartar until boiling, and remove from heat and let sit until it reaches 242 degrees F. Slowly pour syrup into the egg whites and stir. Add vanilla. Beat until frosting thickens. In a blender, pulse coconut flakes and red food coloring until crumbly. Place the coconut mixture in a bowl for rolling. 3. Fill a piping bag with 1/2 frosting. Carefully pipe frosting into the cakes and cover with the cake circle. Frost the rest of the cake with the frosting and then roll in the coconut flakes. Let cool for a few minutes and then enjoy!

Buttery Yeast Rolls I found this on Food.com Prep Time: 2 hrs Total Time: 2 hrs 18 mins Yield: 20-24 rolls Ingredients 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup warm milk 1 eggs 1/3 cup butter or 1/3 cup margarine, softened 1/3 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour ( NOT bread flour!) 1 package dry yeast ( 2 1/4 tsp) 1/4 cup butter or 1/4 cup margarine Directions Place all ingredients except the 1/4 cup butter into bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select the dough cycle and start machine. Shape dough into 20 to 24 balls and place in buttered pan (s). Melt the 1/4 cup butter and brush it over the tops of rolls, saving the excess for brushing on after baking. Cover and let rise in a warm place about 1 hour, or until double in bulk. Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 to 18 minutes. Brush baked rolls with remaining butter. NOTE: This dough can also be divided into two portions and each rolled into a 12-inch circle; spread each circle with softened butter, cut into 8 wedges and roll up starting with wide end, to make crescents OR use this dough for cinnamon rolls or sticky buns. I made a batch of these today and they are really good. I used real butter and rolled them out jelly roll style and buttered and rolled them up and put them in muffin pans. I use the homemade Pam grease and the recipe made 14 large rolls. I baked mine for 15 minutes. I think I will get out two bread machines and make two batches for Thanksgiving. Sue

We're having these for New Year's day--huge football day for us. I'm cutting the recipe in half and not mixing the mayo/MW. I'll just use mayonnaise. HAM AND CHEESE SLIDERS 24 good white dinner rolls 24 pieces good honey ham 24 small slices Swiss cheese 1/3 cup mayonnaise 1/3 cup miracle whip Poppy seed sauce 1 Tablespoon poppyseeds 1 1/2 Tablespoons yellow mustard 1/2 cup butter, melted 1 Tablespoon minced onion 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce In a small bowl, mix together mayonnaise and miracle whip. Spread onto both sides of the center of each roll. Place a slice of ham and a slice of Swiss inside of each roll. Close rolls and place them into a large baking dish or heavy cookie sheet. Place very close together. In a medium bowl, whisk together all of the poppy seed sauce ingredients. Pour evenly over all of the sandwiches. You do not have to use all of the sauce! Just use enough to cover the tops. Let sit 10 minutes or until butter sets slightly. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until cheese is melted. Uncover and cook for 2 additional minutes or until tops are slightly brown and crispy. Serve warm. Note: Sandwiches can be assembled a day ahead and kept in the fridge ready to bake. Don't know what else yet--probably a small vegetable tray.

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn