Kitchen Adventures at Christmastime

I love making goodies during the holidays - coconut bonbons, peanut butter balls, fudge, orange balls, peppermint bark.....yum! When I lived in the US I made them all, but now that I live overseas I seem to be able to tackle only one tasty treat a year.

So, this year I chose orange coconut balls - and here's my story. Coconut orange balls call for chopped nuts, but I don't have a nut chopper. At the grocery I found walnuts, but no chopper. Not to worry: I discovered a nut grinder on the kitchen aisle. Here's a picture of my new nut grinder. It's a beauty. You put the nuts in the top and turn the handle.......
And here's a nice little picture of the inside. Tada.Next comes Nilla Wafers. They don't sell those here, but they do sell similar types of cookies. I crushed them in the nut grinder to make sure I got my money's worth out of that contraption.

The recipe also calls for condensed orange juice. For the first batch I used regular OJ, but the finished product didn't turn out very orangey. They don't sell condensed juice here, so on try #2 I boiled the OJ a little so that some of the water would evaporate. It wasn't completely successful, but better.
And here's the finished product - a gift for my student teacher. Disclaimer: After buying the nut grinder I discovered ground nuts at the grocery store. Woops!