Recipes For Success

I suppose with so much information going digital, recipe boxes may become a thing of the past but old fashioned recipe boxes can be as telling of our history as the family Bible.  I have my collected recipes in several places.   

My traditional recipe box contains recipes that I got as a child through 4-H projects, friends, neighbors and family.  As I look through that box, I can remember from whom each one came, when I first tried it and why I decided I wanted the recipe for my own.  Some of those recipes are typed, some in my own youthful scrawl and some in other people’s handwriting.  There are those that got copied but never used and then those so beloved that they are stained and crusted with remnants of ingredients.  In my mother’s recipe box you would find the revered Whirligig recipe was so overused that the title is worn off the top and the card only softly resembles the rectangular shape familiar to the recipe box.  You would have to know what you were looking for to find it.

I also have a separate recipe booklet with all my recipes from my internship in California and another from a job in a casino bakery.  Unlike my earlier recipes, these are mostly in large measurements and may be in pounds instead of cups.  Few of these recipes list all of the instructions someone would need if they didn’t already know how to make them.  And many of them are hard to read because they have been grease stained through heavy use.

My most used set of recipes is in a forth index card style notepad.  I have slowly compiled many of my favorite recipes in this booklet because I got sick of searching for them elsewhere.  Some of them are repeated from the other locations and some of them are the large restaurant size recipes translated to smaller amounts to use at home.  A few of them are original recipes, variations of other recipes that weren't quite what I wanted.  Recipes don’t go into this book unless they have been taste tested and passed with flying colors. 

Regardless of when they were written or how often they get used, searching through my recipes is like flipping through a photo album in order to spark wonderful memories.