Holiday season once again! Each and every year, I struggle with the gift ritual in my family. Everyone (especially my closest relatives) feel obligated to find some special gifts to give and spend a lot of money on that. I loathe it.

Either it ends up being some useless crap I'll never use or it's stuff so expensive it makes me feel bad about it. Anyway, I used to simply not give anything in return and mumble, but I'm now at an age where I'm supposed to start taking part in this ritual.

So this year, instead of joining the general capitalist frenzy that everyone partakes in, I decided to bake cookies for my loved ones. Cookies are nice, everyone likes them, they are relatively cheap and rely less on exploiting people in the global South than your typical gifts.

Honey Oatmeal Cookies

I received a lot of honey at the end of the summer from a friend who has beehives and I don't really like honey by itself. I prefer the taste of maple syrup. But honey being thicker and having a stronger flavour, it makes a great way to replace processed sugar in a lot of recipes.

I also wanted the cookies to last (we eat enough baked goods during the Holidays as it is), so I wanted them to be hard cookies. He's the recipe I used:

Ingredients

This recipe makes around 50 big cookies. Sorry for the derp units, it's quite standard for recipes here...

• 3 cups salted Butter
• 2 2/3 cups Honey
• 8 cups Oats
• 3 1/2 cups whole Flour
• 3 teaspoons Baking Powder

Baking steps

1 - Melt the butter until fluid. Remove from the heat and add the honey.

2 - Stir in the oats and baking powder.

3 - Stir the flour in.

4 - Grease a cookie sheet and flatten balls of dough into 2 inches cookies (the cookies won't expand or change shape a lot during the baking process, so make them the size you want them to be).

5 - Bake at 375°F for around 35 minutes. This time depends a lot on the size of cookies you made, so watch your first batch and iterate from there. Your cooked cookies should be golden and hard.

Preserved eggs

In October 2016, I made pickled beets and had a lot of liquid left from the process.

I has previously used pickle juice to make preserved eggs, so I decided to use some of the pickled beets juice this way!

A dozen eggs fit nicely in a 1L mason jar and the eggs were ready after approximately 1 week. Don't throw your pickle juices!