Taking Stock

I've taken on a new project lately. No, it's nothing living and in need of shelter. It's my old recipe collection.

I have written favourite and family classics into an old binder for years, but, like me, that binder is beginning to show it's age. For that matter, so are my cookbooks. There is one I bought at work when some fella showed up at the office selling cookbooks. It was a big lug and in fact, has a starring role in the Santa Clause (at the beginning, when he is making dinner). I dont know what possessed me to buy it cause that would mean I would have had to carry it home as I did not drive back then, there is no public transporation in Trenton (still) and it was a good 40 minute walk home. But, I did buy it and I have, some 25 years later, taken the cover right off of it. I have another I scooped at up at a house we were renting when Randi was just a newborn. Still has the address written in the front of it.


So I've decided to start to retype all of these so they are legible, print them off, and put them in page protectors so they don't start colonies of their own for all the butter, sugar and flour I have spilled on them. Then I will keep them in a nice heavy-duty binder. Also, as more often then not, when I'm looking for a recipe I often check the internet, I can then print these ones off and slip them into a nice little page protector as well.


Now I have the original "cyndi's chocolite chip cookies" recipe, Grandma Hall's chocolate cake, my mom's amazing macaroni and cheese, which I can never get right, that yummy butter tart recipe from one book and the Pumpkin Thai soup I tore out of a magazine and made my own. All in one place, and ready for the next generation.


I could just be getting sentimental - and practical - but probably more sentimental. Note the picture I found at the back of my old binder.

I believe Randi would have created this masterpiece before she was even into double digits. Note the joy and happiness, not the sleeping brother up in the house, note that everyone is thinking about a ballerina, which is strange because it wasn't until many years later when we moved into town that we started taking in stray ballerinas.....


And now she is in her last year of University.


Sigh......I'm getting sentimental, and taking stock of my family history of cooking at the same time.