Recipe for Life...

In an attempt to entertain myself this morning, I decided to copy recipes. Throughout my adult life, I have always had a recipe file, with 3 X 5 recipe cards, to use as I cook. Copying recipes out of magazines and newspapers has always been a pleasant pastime for me...

And so, out came the stack of recipes I have torn out of magazines. Out came the recipe box and blank recipe cards. And I sat down....supposedly, to write out recipes.

But something happened. I went on a trip. You see, I actually have three recipe card boxes. Two have the recipes I use most, and the third one was my mother's, and it is stuffed full.....of stuff. And that's the box that I took out....

I found recipes written by my mother, in her special handwriting. And by my paternal grandmother, too. I found a ticket stub for a Little League fundraiser drawing: a microwave oven! The drawing was on June 23, 1978. My mother didn't win....

There was a note, a poem, from our next door neighbor, Millie:

”St. Theresa's Bookmark:

Let nothing trouble thee,
Let nothing affright thee,
All things are passing,
God never changes;
Patience obtains everything,
Nothing is wanting to him who possesses God,
God alone suffices.

Our prayers are with you – Millie”

I have no idea when she wrote it, or what she was referring to, but I know that my mother had the first of her bouts with cancer back in the seventies, so maybe that was it.

There was a business card from a painting contractor. Addresses for companies that sell replacement sterling silver flatware, my brother's bank account number (he was in college, at Berkeley), and a scorecard from the American Contract Bridge League session that my mother attended in 1972.

And lots of recipes, scribbled on the backs of other things, or notepaper found in drawers, for all sorts of wonderful things. My mother always wrote down who gave her the recipe, too, as in Rosemary's Cheese Dish. All sorts of recipes, from Apple Crisp to Zucchini Pie.

Something was stuck in the front of the recipe box; I had to work at it to get it out. It was my father's business card from forty years ago. It has a couple of spots on it that look suspiciously like splattered sauce of some sort. I am sure my mother used it as a bookmark in a cookbook.

She didn't realize that someday, it would be a treasure....as is everything else in the box.

Bon appetit!