Simple Christmas ~ Food Gift Baskets

We put together two food baskets for our family Christmas grab bag.   Since I had picked my dad, and Jacob had picked Uncle Matt, we knew that we should use only food items, and nothing that had to be cooked or baked.  Too bad we didn't pick one of the girls in the family, but there are only three, and I'm one of them!

Here's what Jacob and I did for our recipients.

The first item in each basket would be my maple-sugared almonds.  Click here to see how I decorated the lids to these ordinary jars.

The basket on the left was for my dad, and the one on the right is for Jacob's Uncle Matt.  Each basket was 99 cents at Goodwill!

To Uncle Matt's basket, we added a jar of pickled jalapeños, because he likes spicy things.

As each item was added, we set it in front of its basket and checked it off our lists.

Above, here was what we ended up with!  Here's the list:

• Whole-Wheat Banana Bread Loaf
• Outrageous Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Maple-Sugared Almonds
• Grape Preserves (made with agar)
• Lightly Sweetened Applesauce
• Peach Preserves (made with agar)
• "Chock-Full" Granola (we usually call this Gourmet Granola)

You may not be able to see it, but for the canned products--applesauce and preserves--I made circular labels and used Mod Podge to affix them to the tops of the jars.  Then I painted a thin coat of Mod Podge over the label and the lid, and let that dry overnight.

Since we waited until Christmas morning to actually package these up into each basket, I'm sad to say I have no actual pictures of the put-together baskets!  For the filler, I used tissue paper--oh, and I totally ran out after doing one basket!!  Can you believe that??  Fernando ran upstairs to the wrapping paper box and came down with lime green paper and royal blue paper.  Argh.  So what I did was use white and lime green in one basket, and white and blue in the other basket.  They actually turned out beautiful, whew!  Here they are, in wrapping paper under the foyer table at my parents' house:

When my dad opened his basket, he showed off his maple-sugared almonds--he had sampled a ruined batch I had made the week before and loved them.  Ruined = didn't dry right because I messed up the recipe so they stayed messy-sticky, but they still tasted super awesome!  Notice the lime green paper!!

Finally, here's Uncle Matt opening his blue and white gift basket:

Although our family members knew we didn't have any money to spend on even the $20 gift limit, Matt commented that the items in the basket were probably worth around $50.  He's probably right, but it was our pleasure to give these gifts this year!


Back to life,
Christine

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