NEW ORLEANS – WGNO News with a Twist features guy Wild Bill Wood has a question for a nun.
The nun is Sister Geneva James.
The question is this from Wild Bill, “Sister Geneva, what’s the secret ingredient in your famous pecan Christmas cookies?”
Sister Geneva leads a chorus of Christmas cookie helpers who say, “the secret ingredient is love!”
The cookies get served up at Christmas and now just in time for Easter.
Sister Geneva says, “that cookie brings joy and it’s so delicious you have to eat more than one. ”
If you are hungry for the holidays, Sister Geneva James has found THE sweet treat for the season of seasons.
It’s those cookies baked with a heaping, helping of love.
How do they make the cookies?
With a meat slicer, a machine made to cut baloney and ham in a deli.
That’s the secret weapon in the battle to bake Christmas cookies and Easter cookies, too, which look like they’ve been on a holiday diet.
They’re lean and crispy.
Light and lean and wafer-thin.
Thin like a Pringles Potato Chip.
Or as Sister Geneva James says thin like, “like Oprah on Weight Watchers.”
This time of year, Sister Geneva James becomes Santa Claus. And the sister as Santa has a bakery full of elves.
And she’s the Easter Bunny with a kitchen full of helpers.
Her elves don’t get a paycheck.
They’re all volunteers.
They volunteer to fill tins full of the icebox pecan cookies .
They make them and bake them for Sister Geneva’s order, the New Orleans nuns who run Sisters of the Holy Family.
From the money they make from the cookies, the sisters help the poor.
Making Christmas sweeter with cookies is a 20-year tradition for the Sisters of the Holy Family.
From the freezer, they roll out the dough made about a month ago. The dough goes to that meat slicer. Then the cookies pop into the oven for three minutes at 350 degrees.
Wild Bill asks Joan Giron, one of the elf volunteers, “what in the world do you do while you’re waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven?”
Joan Giron says, “we turn up the radio and dance!”
Turns out, once the radio’s turned up, they all dance. They step up and into the right recipe.
If you would like to order some of the Easter cookies from the Sisters of the Holy Family, give them a phone call at 504-241-3088.