My once and future holiday project.
Once up a time, in the 1980’s, when I was a newly minted adult, I embarked on an ambitious project to collect our favorite family recipes and put them together. I gathered together all the magazine clippings, handwritten recipes from my grandmothers, even the printed recipes from when my parents took a Chinese cooking class. I solicited my friends for recipes they made that I loved.
One of the reasons for this was, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t a great cook. Or even much of a cook at all actually. I figured if I was going to rely on my own skills to feed myself, I better get cracking at it.
I put in a couple months of typing, copying, binding, and I produced my magnum opus. There in all its dot-matrix printer glory was Family Recipes. I gave a copy of to most of my family and the friends who had shared recipes.
Over the decades, I made a lot of notes and corrections in my copy. I documented how I or others had updated the recipes. I would occasionally think to myself that maybe it’s time for a new compilation. I periodically would type up a copy of a new or improved recipe and kept a file of them.
At some point, in a cross country move, the box with all my treasured source material was lost. The loss of the grandmother’s canning recipes was what hit the hardest. But losing the old tattered clippings was almost as bad. There was a recipe Zippy Chuck clipped from and old magazine that evolved into the best brisket recipe ever. Another was an old pamphlet of holiday cookies from around the world. Yet another magazine clipping was for sour cream fudge, filled with glaceed red and green cherries. The fudge part was wonderful, but the glaceed cherries were not, so those were replaced with walnuts. I can visualize all these things and I am thankful that, though the originals are lost, my dog-eared copy of an old project still exists.
What I am doing here, with this recipe blog, is updating and compiling the old recipes. I often look back at my youthful optimism in thinking that all I needed to learn to cook was a handful of recipes from family and friends. It’s taken many years and miles, but I can now consider myself a good cook. I hope you enjoy both the old recipes and the new ones I have gathered over the years. Maybe one day, I will even print out the recipes, bind them as a new family cookbook, and once again share them with my family and friends.
I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!
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