Memories and such

We were watching television the other night. Some decorating show. Today I was eating a bowl of cereal and thinking about some of my tasks for the day. One of the things I had planned was making granola. I looked at the glass-front cabinet and wondered where the recipe might be. Staring back at me were too many cookbooks that I never look at.

One thing led to another and soon I was pulling down all of the cookbooks. I ws going to make the re-cycle center unhappy. I started weeding through the cookbooks- bought cookbooks, inherited cookbooks. WE have too many cookbooks. Some have been saved by the scurge of "sentimentality" more than content.

But then I'm the family member others turn to to dispose of beat-up prayer books and Bibles (he's going to hell already, let him do it) so I steeled my heart with a piece of leftover haloween candy and started.

The first book was a church cookbook from the mid-50's. Church of my youth. WAnt to know how one of the parishoners wrote how to make Creole chicken? Put chicken pieces in a pan. Add some chopped onion and pour a can of vegetable soup over it before baking.

Yum! But then those folks were dynamic cooks. I even saw a cake recipe with a can of tomato soup. Double yum. And I recognized the names of women who submitted the recipes most of them have been dead for years. I read every recipe (quickly) one of them. I'm happy or sad to report that there were no recipes from my mother or my grandmother. My mother used soup. My grandmother made soup.

Many of the cookbooks are set aside to make a trip to the secondhand bookstore. Others went to the recycle bin.

So I revisited some memories and dumped prods for other. That's the way life is.

G