Warning: when you’re working on healthy eating and attending WeightWatchers, maybe working on a recipe book of your family favorites is not the best idea. Holy smokes, I’m ravenous now.
I’ve been formatting and cutting and pasting recipes all day into the template I’m using for our family recipe book. What a fun and drooly way to spend my very last day of holiday vacation! I was actually a bit worried before I started that I wouldn’t be able to find enough recipes to make a substantial book.
Ha.
HAHAHA! Turns out, we have a LOT of family favorites. Years worth. And new ones all the time, since Anders spends quite a lot of time looking for new yummy recipes on various reliable sites. Just the cookie recipes alone are probably enough for a book all on their own.
I asked both kids what family favorites they wanted to include and they both said Creamy Crab Nachos. Heh. I already had it, as well as a couple of others that we return to with embarrassing frequency. I have a huge clip-book stuffed full of recipes both tried and true and for future experimentation, ripped out of magazines or printed out from various sources and friends. My mom gave it to me when I left college and got my first apartment. It was full of our family recipes, each page in her handwriting, and plenty of blank pages for me to add recipes as I discovered good stuff. Now there are no blank pages left and the book is so stuffed it won’t close and takes up double the space in the cookbook shelf.
And people think I don’t cook! 😀
After all, I AM over 50 and have been helping to feed a family of 4 for 18 years, even if Anders is by far the better chef in our kitchen. I was in the AWC cooking club for years and came up with menus every time I hosted Wonders. I’ve participated in the AWC holiday cookie exchange for nearly 20 years. Some of the recipes I’m including are ones we’ve served at New Year’s dinners and birthday parties and Midsommar. Some of them are basic, like spaghetti squash or deviled eggs. Some are more complicated like Salmon Wellington. It’s fun to see the names of all the friends who have given me copies of THEIR favorites, that have become ours, too.
I also see a preponderance of recipes that include one or more of the following: artichokes, crème fraîche, chicken, salmon, spinach, pastry, white chocolate, cranberries and zucchini. I have no problem with that. Yum yum!
It will be fun to have a recipe book with all our favorites collected in one place. I should have thought of this before Christmas! Although, with the amount of recipes still to go through, transcribe, and in some cases, translate, I suspect I might have NEXT year’s gifts ready by the time the holidays roll around again!