Food

In my childhood food was something you eat when your parents put it on the table. Heavy, greasy, tasty. All households had cookbooks, but the real treasures were hundreds, if not thousands of recipes diligently collected by mothers along the years. They came in all shapes and sizes, handwritten, typed, on small pieces of paper, on napkins, newspaper clips, many untitled. My mother had a sweet tooth (see the chestnut incident in a previous post), so she collected mostly cake recipes.

Our old family cookbook (written by Szmuk Iren) is now barely in one piece, its yellow pages crumbling away with every touch and turn. I still consult it many times when I want to prepare something with a childhood taste. During the past years, I also bought some new trendy cookbooks I consult on occasion, but I find myself more and more searching for recipes on the net. My technique is synthesizing a few recipes of the same dish and making my own combination. I also watch the Food channel on satellite and get ideas from there.

Recently, my husband started organizing some old stuff in our storage and surfaced my mom's collection of recipes I kept after she died 20 years ago, and his mom's. One one hand I really don't feel like investing a lot of time in understanding, sorting and digitizing age old recipes. On the other hand, there is a slim chance I might discover a few true gems. In the mean time I keep procrastinating and crying out for sound advice.

Help!