family recipes

 i am done moving all my recipes that were saved on paper from the green binder and just laying around loose paper to my new notebook systems.  i saved the best part for last - family recipes written out by my mom.  i always thought she had the best handwriting.  i wanted to make sure i had something handwritten by her to remember how cool her writing was.

i didn't even realize until just now that she too had a big binder of recipes for years and years,  over time the binder broke, her way of cooking changed, and perhaps she even did her own cull of recipes.  Now it's just some loose pages, some of which my dad gave to me.

I absolutely did not want to get rid of her originals, and I found (yet another) blank notebook in the basement, this one standard paper size, and pasted in her originals

 my whole childhood and well into my teens, my mom would spend a lot of time and effort before christmas to make huge treat boxes for both sets of grandparents - cookies, chocolate, sweet bread, and her most excellent caramel corn.  i always was recruited for this one, to do the stirring every 15 minutes.  she would make so much of this every year, but it was so good and the only time of year we got to have it.

 

there is a 100% chance i will never make this cake, but i couldn't not keep the recipe.

 please enjoy this magazine page from 1984 (!) which was a fancy ass meal when i was a kid.  my mom never messed around and made the puff pastry, just the chicken, but i do remember this dish and i recall making it in my early 20's, the occasional time i was flush enough to be able to afford to buy both chicken AND bacon on my minimum wage paycheque.

 

 

bread and notebook progress

 bread!

 notebooks!

 i am still plugging away at moving everything to my new notebook(s) but i think i am nearly there!  i was definitely holding on to a lot of recipes that realistically i was never going to make, so that felt good to let go.  its a small job, in the big picture, but one that i'm happy to be almost done with.

a new era of notebooks has begun

 i have spoke before many times about my cooking notebooks and binders, and how i am working on paring down my cookbook collection, and about how i have likely hundreds of recipes saved on my phone, in my computer bookmarks, on pinterest and tick tok.  so why do i fight each and every week to find meals to cook?

part of it i think is screen fatigue, i look at a computer screen all day for work, and while i have been known to enjoy some mindless scrolling on tick tok - how else am i finding all these cooking videos? - most nights the last thing i want to do is sit and scroll through hundreds of videos to find the one i want to make that night.

so i decided to make a new notebook.  an end game notebook, if you will.

i visited the notebook aisle of my local dollar store and picked up yet another notebook, and one lunch break at work i sat and copied 4 recipes from tick tok into the notebook and lo and behold, i had dinner planned for the next 4 days.  

 progress has been slow because i have to be in the mood to watch a video and transcribe it to the notebook, and also be sitting somewhere that i can write legibly, so this book is useful, and that is not lying down on the couch watching Cardinal and trying to stay awake.

recently i decided that since i'm trying to streamline, i should copy in the recipes that i either love or still want to try from the green binder too.  the green binder is messy, probably 90% of the pages are either ripped from magazines, or pages cut from magazines or printed out and taped to full size pages in the book.  my new notebook system, i had already decided, would be much tidier, all neatly handwritten in a book.  

 

that lasted 11 seconds until i actually opened the green binder and the first 3 pages that fell out were family recipes of my and the misters family that I would rather have the original of, and not copied.  so i taped them in.

after i taped them in i was like no more!  but i already know that won't necessarily be true - i have a few of my moms recipes that she wrote out and i always loved her handwriting, so i will want to keep those too.  

i'm using a critical eye as well with the transition, not adding everything, but looking and seeing if it's worth keeping - if we already made it, would we want to eat it again?  if we haven't - realistically will we make it?  i've already recycled quite a few pages, and didn't even feel bad about how long i have held on to some of them.  sometimes it's good to let go.