Aloha, all!
Just two days until Christmas, but I finally figured out how to present the gift that I bought for my husband. Actually, we both shared a gift by treating ourselves to several days at a local resort on Hawaii's Big Island earlier in the month. Good prices for that early in December, especially for people who live on the island!
But the day after we got back, I was in a local grocery store and saw an ingredient from one of the very first dinners my husband made for me when we began dating well over 30 years ago. I mentioned it to him, and we both reminisced 
about the very first dinner he made for me, as well as the one with the special ingredient I had seen.
He then wondered what had become of the cookbook he'd bought and used as he was trying to woo me way back when. We've moved three times since then, and somewhere along the way, the cookbook disappeared.
That was the bad news. The good news was that Amazon is a good source for finding old, out-of-print cookbooks. It arrived at my doorstep a few days ago. Woo-hoo!
But I've spent the past several days trying to figure out how to make a special, memorable wrapping. Finally today I realized that the wrapping wasn't going to be what made it special. I was going to make a bookmark, which would stay in the book as long as we have it (I'm hand carring it with whatever move we make this Spring!), and the bookmark would have a loving note on the back.
For the bookmark, I used cardstock from several sheets from the Under the Tree Specialty Designer Series Paper set. I picked one of the Early Espresso sheets because I definitely wanted this to be a masculine bookmark. Then I die cut some snowflakes using the smallest snowflake in the Snowflake Card Thinlits Die. For these I picked out some scraps from some of the Cherry Cobbler and Garden Green sheets. I also used the same Die set to cut the "Joy". It got lost a bit more than the snowflakes when I tried to adhere it to the dark background. So I used the Ticket Duo Builder Punch to create a background for it, again using one of the pieces of cardstock in the Under the Tree Specialty paper set. The bookmark is as long as the cookbook is high.
OK – if you've read this far, then you're interested. The ingredient I saw (and I rarely see it in our stores) was fresh Chicken Livers. The recipe, from Pierre Franey's 60 Minute Gourmet, calls for double-sauteeing the chicken livers, once in butter and the other in peanut oil, then flambeeing them with brandy. There are other ingredients, but those are the main ones. Along with this recipe, the book calls for making an egg noodle dish using butter as well as chopped eggs with some cheese. Hmmm, does sound like something that might raise my cholesterol level about 30 points just reading about it! So you can probably see why it's not on our regular cooking schedule. We may just have to make it one more time once he gets the cookbook in his stocking!
An unfortunate side note to this is that, just this past Thursday, our local grocery store had to go out of business as the lava flow from the Kilauea Volcano is threatening the shopping center where it was located. Now I'll have to go searching for Chicken Livers!
Even though it's late in the season as well as in the publication timespan for the Stampin' Up! Holiday Catalog, I thought you might still be interested in the bookmark ingredients! Especially note that the Ticket Duo Building Punch is on sale as part of the Stampin' Up! Year-End Closeout Sale!
