HISTORY IN THE BAKING

We are leaving tomorrow for South Dakota. We are spending a few post-Christmas days with my brother Clint and his wife Mary and their two great kids, Kelsey and Tristan.

Since Clint's birthday was a week ago, I decided to make some of my pineapple carrot bread that he loves and take it up to him as a post-birthday treat. But to do that, I had to enter my recipe basket. Now on the outside, my recipe basket is beautiful. It is the Longaberger recipe basket. On the inside, it's a mess. That's the way my life feels sometimes but that's another post. Some of the recipes are still on the torn out magazine page. Some are scribbled on an envelope. Some are actually just the label to the food product on which I found them. But I always figured if this way was good enough for Great Grandma Hale, it's good enough for me.

But after finding my bread recipe I decided to sort the recipes and "neaten things up a bit." That lead me to look on the web for some recipe card templates that would allow me to type the recipes in and print them out and have them all on uniform cards. But I couldn't find one I liked so I started hand writing them on 4x6 cards.

Now I am a woman possessed. And as I hand write each one, I am glad I am doing it this way. Some of the recipes in my basket are handwritten. In my grandmother's writing or in a good friend's writing. Those I will keep as they are. They are history. They are the touch of a loved one.

Some of my grandmother's are typed (she typed a lot of things - even her daily prayer list) but each of them has a handwritten note on them. Like "I use pecans" or "freeze up to 2 months." So there is that piece of her on those little faded cards.

Someday, Kayla will be looking at these cards and recognize my writing. Someday I will be looking at them and recognize her writing, as she is helping me. I will read the recipe and remember the week after Christmas, when she was 12, and she sat at the counter with me and copied recipes off of ragged magazine pages.

Ah, memories...