Gifts from the Kitchen ("Many People are Turning to Edible Gifts this Year")

By Hklbrries

Recipes in collection associated with this article: Old-Fashioned Gingerbread Loaves, Lemon Bars, Easy Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter Cookies, Herbed Bread Sticks, Coffee Cake Mix, Irish Cream Liqueur, Mexican Coffee-Flavored Liqueur and Apricot Hazelnut Biscotti.

On a recent Saturday morning, every inch of countertop in Linda Meyer’s spacious kitchen was covered – with flour canisters, sticks of butter, molasses jars, baking sheets and the hands of seven women who attended Meyer’s “gifts from the kitchen” cooking class.

“I’ve set up stations here,” she told the group. “Let’s start by putting two of you on gingerbread.”

Side by side, the apron-clad participants made gingerbread loaves, lemon bars, peanut butter cookies, chocolate-covered toffee and other treats that they would later package and give away for Christmas.

With so many people living on tight budgets these days, more home cooks might whip up edible gifts this holiday season instead of giving store-bought items to friends and co-workers. Gifts from the kitchen can usually be made on a small budget, and even packaging them could be done economically – not to mention eco-consciously.

“You can get pretty little things at thrift stores,” Meyer said, holding up a secondhand Christmas-themed tin she planned to line with wax paper and fill with treats.

Kris McIlvenna, who owns Greenbriar Foods Inc. with her husband, Bob, and has taught “gifts from the kitchen” classes for 15 years, said she’s noticing a steady interest in edible holiday gifts this year, but for a different reason.

“The people who are attending these classes are no longer young mothers” trying to save money, McIlvenna said. “They’re nearing retirement, and they have the wherewithal to buy gifts … but they regard (homemade presents) as a social thing and a gift of themselves.”

She added, “They’ve been through childrearing and grandchild rearing and they know what they value: handmade things.”

Whatever the reason for giving edible gifts, McIlvenna and Meyer agree: make it delicious and present it in an attractive way, and it will be appreciated.

During the class at Greenbriar Inn, in Coeur d’Alene, students learned to make coffee-flavored liqueur with cream, double-chocolate biscotti, cocoa mix and chocolate-dipped peppermint sticks. They poured the liqueur into bottles and packaged everything together with Christmas mugs from a dollar store. All together, the ingredients for that gift would cost someone less than $9 to replicate, McIlvenna said.

They also made a dry bean soup mix, puff-pastry breadsticks, apricot-almond biscotti, a meat rub, a salad dressing and a coffee-cake mix.

McIlvenna showed the group how to make gift tags and decorate gift bags, an activity that brought out the kid in the participants, she said.

“I had them working with potato stamps,” McIlvenna said. “Every time I do this class it reminds me of how adults often fail to play – fun, innocent, creative play.”

Some of the most simple and inexpensive packaging ideas McIlvenna demonstrated, like attaching berries and leaves to a box of treats with a hot glue gun, drew the most “oh, wows” from the group, she said.

“Often it’s what’s on the outside that sells what’s on the inside,” she said.

In a different way, that goes for shipping, too. You don’t want to put the effort into making a batch of beautiful cookies only to have them crumble under the weight of other packages in the back of a Fed-Ex truck.

Meyer said if you wrap it right, almost any treat can be shipped to faraway friends and family. And if it can’t, adapt it.

“I’d never ship a pie, but I might ship little tarts,” she said.

She suggested packaging food in tins with several layers of wax paper as a cushion, and then taping the sides of the tin shut. Then, surround the tin with Styrofoam peanuts or bubble wrap in an outer box.

Meyer also advised considering the climate where you’re shipping the gifts. Chocolate-dipped anything could become a melty mess if it’s heading to a hot part of the world.

Meyer began teaching cooking and baking classes after moving to North Idaho from Rhode Island in 2007. Wanting to meet people in her new community, she formed a group called CDA What’s Cooking on the social networking site Meet Up.

The group has about 50 members who gather at least once a month at Meyer’s house to learn a new type of cuisine or baking technique. She doesn’t charge for her classes; she just asks each attendee to bring an ingredient or two.

As the “gifts from the kitchen” class continued in Meyer’s Rathdrum house that Saturday, the smells of molasses and peanut butter and a feeling of warmth took over.

Shannon Peckham drove from North Spokane to attend. Peckham, who says she cooks so infrequently her oven is spotless, said she plans to surprise her family with some home-baked treats this winter.

“Linda asked me to bring some confex—, confection—, some kind of sugar today, and I didn’t know what it was,” Peckham said, referring to confectioners’ (or powdered) sugar.

As items came out of the oven and off the stovetop, the women moved their treats to a table in the foyer where Meyer had set out examples of how to package the food with cellophane and bows. On the table were lemon bars, fudge and a gingerbread man that was about 18 inches tall.

Meyer said when she gives gifts from the kitchen, she tries to stick with traditional recipes, like those.

“People tell me it reminds them of being with their grandmother,” she said. “The old-time stuff, if you bring it back, people love it.”

Ingredients

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Preparation

Step 1

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