 Hey y'all, it's Timmy with Colored Valley Cooks. I'm going to tilt y'all just a hair so that my head's not cut off. Okay, it is the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve Eve, I guess you would call it. And to tell you the truth, I'm tired. We have been moving May, we're all helping May. We were in Savannah yesterday. We've been running around and I'm really tired today. So I had already made chili the other day and some sausage balls. And today I am going to make just vegetable soup in cornbread. Now, there's a lot of recipes that you guys can make and I'm gonna share them as the day goes on. I just shared my cheese ball, it's really good. I'll be sharing my potato soup, pimento cheese and different things like that over the next couple of days because it is the holiday and I do have to spend some time wrapping gifts. I'm super behind, I don't even have my gifts wrapped. Okay, but I thought, I came in here just to fix this up and I thought, you know what? It wouldn't hurt for me to go live and it's gonna take a few minutes because let me show you what I bought. I bought these pretty little pearl onions and they're all different colors and I thought since it's Christmas, I would put them in my vegetable soup. Aren't they cute? So I'm gonna stand here and peel my little onions and I guess we could just chat while I'm peeling onions. I may just peel a few and put them in here and then peel the rest of them while we're off but we are gonna use these little pearl onions in our soup, aren't they cute? Cutesy-weezy and I didn't wipe out the bottom of my bowl to make it look real pretty for y'all. Hey, hey, I've got my ground beef over here browning. So do y'all wanna come closer and watch and me put everything in the bowl and then we'll chat while I peel the onions, how's that? So I've got ground beef over here on the stove and what we'll do is we'll bring it over here and we'll put it in our pot right quick. There's our pot, all right? And so I'm just gonna, I gotta rinse these little onions off after I peel them. So let me get me a little bowl to put them in. Things different than I normally do because it's Christmas, all right? Today, we are going to, well, I always use ground beef in my soup. So I'll spoon some ground beef in here. I call it ground beef. And I haven't drained it yet, okay? So I'm just gonna let it drip and put some in here. I've ground enough ground beef for several different dishes and I thought, well, while I'm browning, I may as well brown a bunch. So I'm thinking about doing one Italian dish over the weekend, maybe lasagna. So I'll probably use half ground beef and half Italian sausage in my lasagna. That's what I like to do. I do have a good lasagna recipe as well. Maybe one more little scoop. It's all I need in here. Now I always put beef in my vegetable soup, I know. Mama always did. She always used ground beef in our vegetable soup and so I do. We're gonna be peeling some potatoes and peeling these little pearl onions and I am going to use a can of my tomatoes that when I put these up, matter of fact, these may actually be from last year, last two summers ago, because they have salt and pepper in them. They're like stewed tomatoes. And so this is what I've already took the top off that before y'all come on. I didn't want to have to fight with the seal, but it was sealed really good and it's got salt and pepper in it already. So we're gonna go ahead and put this in our soup and we're gonna use our whole-body tomatoes today because it's Christmas. All right. Now, the next thing we're going to do is I've got some garden peas that we put up from our garden. So we're gonna put these in there. Now, not all of them in here, but a good many of them. So these are purple whole peas from the garden. You know, I could put them all in there, but I don't think I will because I wanna put some green peas in here too. These are just green peas from the freezer section at the grocery store. That's one thing I don't grow is green peas. All right. And then I like white corn in my soup. I'm not a sweet corn in the soup beater. Okay, I just don't. The tomatoes to me are sweet enough. So I use a white chupag corn in my soup. And we're gonna add some of that and all this has been in the freezer for a while. All right. So all that's gone in there, the tomatoes from my can. We're gonna chop up some potatoes to go in here and our beautiful little pearl onions and we'll chat while we're doing that. How's that? If y'all wanna chat with me, I can look at your comments and chat with you guys while I peel these little onions. Aren't they cute? The girls are going to be like, what? They're not used to getting, whoops, little pearl onions in their soup. It will also peel our potatoes. Well, that one's little, she'll don't wanna come off. There it goes. Well, my goodness, I may have to just take out the outer part of it. Instead of having to fight with it. It's a very fresh pearl onion. All right, I can tell right now, we're not gonna be able to stay on here while I'm peeling all these little pearl onions to take too much time, especially if they're this fresh. Okay. So we're gonna hop over to the sink and we're gonna peel our potatoes. And I need to turn the slide on. So we're going to have potatoes in it. My girls love potato soup, but I don't even have enough potatoes to make potato soup. I've only got four potatoes. So I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna throw together some vegetable soup. And if they don't want it, they can eat the chili because they're only gonna be here one night. And they loved cheese balls. So I may throw together a cheese ball for them, but I've already got a really good video of it. So are y'all ready? I bet y'all were not like me and don't have your presents gift wrapped. My sister went shopping yesterday. She said it was so crowded it took her 45 minutes to get out of the parking lot. Now, I have not been out and of course she wore a mask, but I shopped pretty early for the most part. Oh, and I got this apron as a gift today in the mail. I got it on my porch. I'll show it to you in just a sec. Super cute from Liz. I guess we could throw together a pomegranate too while we're at it. So I've gotta make something sweet. Amy wanted a chocolate delight for Thanksgiving and then she changed her mind and decided on the fudge pie that I make. And so this time I may surprise her with a chocolate delight. She comes on Christmas Eve. Look y'all, I don't know if y'all know it or not, but our church is going to have a Christmas Eve service downtown in St. Mary's, all right? So me and Chris are gonna try our best to bring it to you guys live on Christmas Eve through our YouTube channel. So I will also copy it onto here after we get home that evening. So that if you don't have YouTube, you can watch it. You just won't see it live, but you'll still get to see the service. You know, it'll just be like a replay. So if y'all want to be a part of our Christmas Eve service, then tune in and I really don't even know what time it starts, so I can't tell you yet, okay? Just look for us. I'm sure it's probably, I wanna say six. Six o'clock-ish from six to seven Eastern time is what I wanna say. So I'm gonna put these potatoes in here in our soup. So at least we're getting our garden tomatoes in here, our garden peas in here, some fresh potato. It'll be a good soup. And you can use some V8 juice. I used to use V8 juice all the time. I don't even know if I had any, but we'll go over there in the pantry and look right quick and just see if I have any. And if we have some, we'll use it. When I was younger, I always used V8 juice in my soup. It's really good. So I'll take y'all in there to the pantry with me in just a sec. Yes, I'm wearing out. And I woke up this morning to tell you the truth. And my eyes were real bloodshot red and I don't know why. And I'm really kinda tired today. And I'm not getting anything crazy. But we'll see. I could just be tired from yesterday because we had such a long drive on the road and we're at May's. We just bought May an angel of house and they'll be helping us of course with the payment but it's a lot cheaper than renting an apartment. And I did post that on here today if you wanna go take a look at the pictures of their home. I just made a little slideshow video out of it. So we're gonna go in here to my pantry and just see if I might have some V8 juice. This is my stock pantry and I do not see V8 juice. There's some. So this is my stock pantry. You can see I keep my extra Crisco and condiments, my boxed goods in here. And then I keep my overflow, most of my glass jar type things in here. And a few extras in the back that I always have to have plenty of. So we're gonna grab a little bit of the V8 juice and we'll put a little bit in our soup. Look, y'all, at all the cards I've gotten, I've got this door full. I've got both doors full on both sides. So if you sent me one, you may see yours but they're on both sides of the door. These are the last ones I got in on the back sides of the doors. Show ya. Cool, huh? And I got a few pictures. Let me move this. I got a few pictures of viewers, which is nice because then I can tell what you look like. So it's been a real blessing to get all these cards this year. And I even got a picture of somebody's doggy. Nice, huh? I love it. When we get off here, I'll turn on my Christmas music. And enjoy my Christmas music, but I can't do that when y'all are on here. It's copyrighted, you know? All right, so I'm gonna put this over here. Let's just go ahead and pour a little bit of V8 juice in it. I'll finish this up after we get off. We'll mix up some Corred real quick. And then I'll sign off. What'd I do with my V8 juice? Here it is. I need to shake it up. Shake it up big, big, no. So thank you, thank you for my beautiful apron. If you're on here watching. Liz, you know who you are, my dear. And I'm not gonna use all of it. I'm gonna use about half of it. And we will mix that up. I'm gonna have to chop these tomatoes up a little bit. So we will go ahead and do that as well. Let me get me a fork. And we'll chop these tomatoes up a little bit. We'll see, they're stewed, so they're probably just gonna fall to pieces. It looks like, so that's fine. They're really just gonna turn the tomato sauce, to tell you the truth. But it's gonna be good. It's gonna be good, y'all. It's gonna be good. All right. And then I'll put all those little baby pearl onions in there, and it's gonna be really good with some Corbett. Now, I like to do stuff like this, potato soup, chili, vegetable soup, chicken and dumplings. Those are the kinds of things I like to have for Christmas, because then you just put it in the refrigerator, you just pull it out and get a bowl when you want it, and you got plenty to eat, you know? And then you can enjoy your appetizers, because you're not getting so full on food. And so that's just what I like to do. All right, let's mix up some cornbread while it don't be. Let me get out my stuff. And we will put some in the oven. And then Chris can have some cornbread milk when he comes home for lunch. So I'm gonna turn on my little oven. I'm gonna preheat it. Yogis, all right. For my cornbread, I usually melt, whoops, about this much butter for real. I just happen to have some on the counter. So I'm gonna put this in the microwave and melt it while I get out my buttermilk. And we need one egg and we'll mix us up a little cornbread, all right? So that's what we'll do. I just took this out of the freezer. I need to use it on my dessert. We'll get out a buttermilk. I'm going to make little smokies and just use croissant, y'all know, and make those little pieces of blankets for the kids because they like them. Super easy. And they just love them. I'm trying to make sure this doesn't blow up and make a mess. I'm going to make a mess in my microwave. It's clean. Okay, so what I typically do is I put the butter in and I melt it. I never put butter in my cornbread until I'm at crisp and it's something that he does. And so that's what I do. And this is our white lily cornmeal. Now, this shows the white cornmeal mix but I actually use buttermilk cornmeal mix. So mine is actually the one that looks green as the buttermilk cornmeal mix. That's what I like the best. So I am going to use a cup of this and this is just cornmeal with self-rising flour in it is what it is, all right? And it smokes when you use it. The flour smokes. It's a smoky one. I'm going to put us an egg in there. Get me out my iron skillet. I just washed it this morning and I got to grease it. Still a little bit wet. I need to wipe it out. I just did that before we came home and they'd sit there watering the wall. All right, and then a little shot then to put in our pan, little buttermilk and I'm just going to put a little bit of oil in it, okay? Cause I've already got butter in it and then we're going to mix it up. Talk about easy. Lord. No wonder Southern gals like biscuits in cornbread. It's instant gratification quick. We don't have to wait on the yeast to rise, you know? And it's good. I just could not bring myself to make yeast bread. It just drives me crazy to have to wait on the dough. I even have a hard time waiting on the dough for pie crust. It just aggravates me. I guess I'm impatient. And so I just make my quick breads like my mom always did and don't worry about the rest of them too much. It's what I do. It's what I was raised on. Mama make yeast breads about once a year. Mama would do it for holidays and I don't even do it for holidays sometimes. It's according if I'm in the mood. But I got some really good recipes for muffins and coffee cakes and different stuff like that if you go on and look on our website. And there's some really good stuff you can make for breakfast on there if you wanna go take a look. All different kinds of biscuits, cinnamon raisin biscuits, blueberry biscuits. Just different stuff like that. Now, I'm gonna be going to see daddy in January. We'll be getting up there around the night. And so I'll be cooking for daddy while I'm up there and I'll probably make a few things that he likes like his coconut coffee. He wants another one. You know, I made him one for Thanksgiving. He already wants another one. The reason I do that to my pan is it makes the cornbread crunchier if you're wondering. And I know a lot of y'all think you gotta heat your skillet up. I've done that, of course I have but I personally like this way the very best. It makes very crunchy cornbread. When you heat a skillet up, the oil is in the bottom of it and when you pour your batter into it it spreads out the oil and lots of times it'll stick in the middle. And this is the way I prefer to do it. It makes a very, very good cornbread. The kind you can just flip right out and crunchy on the outside. And so I like to you shorten a good bit of it. Now use a good bit, be generous with your shortening and then take your cornmeal mix and just flour it like you would a cake pan almost with a little extra in the bottom and you're gonna have some really, really crunchy cornbread when it's done and you don't need to heat up the skillet. It works every time. And then you bake it at 425 degrees until it's nice and golden brown. Now Chris, this soup won't be done by the time he gets home, I doubt it. I mean it will if he comes in late but if he comes in early he may just get some cornbread milk for lunch. It'll make him happy, he loves cornbread milk and that will be that. Then he can eat the soup for supper with crackers. All right. So either way, it's a home run for me. And I've got this rat down up too high. I gotta move it one notch and that is it. That is it. Now all I gotta do is cut up all my really pretty little pearl onions, put them in my soup and we're going to have soup made. Now I'm gonna have soup and chili sausage balls. I won't do the little smokies until they get here and I am going to gotta make a dessert. I just saw this topping that goes on brownies and I'm really tempted to do it for the kids. And if I do that I'll video it because it's gonna be really good and it's really pretty. So I may do that and no it's not coconut. It's like a creamy buttery layer that you put on top of your brownie and then you put like a ganache over the top of that and then after it cools you cut them and they just look so delicious to me. So I actually may do that for the kids. I think they would really like it and it would be a good video and they're really pretty on the table. So I may do that and if I do you'll see that video soon. All right, our meal is not until the 26th. So we will see you next time on Colored Belly Cooks. Make sure to tune in to our live Christmas service tomorrow night on YouTube. Love ya, bye.