Less Than a Week Until T-Day!!

I'm surprised about how excited I'm getting about Thanksgiving this year.

Maybe it's because it's also my girl's birthday? This year it really is on Thanksgiving. How cool is that?

We are having the big meal at my house again. Maggiano's will be doing the cooking again. My Mamacita is bringing green bean casserole and I think Sissy is bringing deviled eggs. (We talked about it but now I don't remember what we said.) Just planning the family gathering has gotten me into a feel-good holiday mood.

I'm also excited about an upcoming wedding for my cousin's son. They will be getting married the weekend after Christmas. Cathy had a very nice Bridal Shower for the Bride at her house. It was so much fun. Cathy sent two blank recipe cards in the Bridal Shower invitations so that we would bring her a recipe to build her newlywed recipe repertoire. What a good idea! When we got to the shower Cathy had a matching recipe book that had plastic slipcovers for each of the recipes. Now that is just too cool.

It made me remember a project I did the Christmas after D. was born. I got my family to share recipes with me. Most specifically my Grandmother who was 89 that year. The project took longer than you would think. I believe I got started on it before D. was born. As well as getting recipes from Grandma, both of my sisters along with my Dad, Aunt, and Mother In Law gave me recipes.

We did not live in the same town. And {I'm dating myself here} we did not have email! I am not kidding. So to get recipes from everyone I had to ask them to send in the mail. (Snail mail was the only mail we had.) Grandma did not send recipes. Actually, she did send recipes. They were just nothing I'd ever remembered her making before. They were all of these very fancy recipes. Not at all what I wanted.

I wanted to know how she made what we had for Sunday lunch or what we had on summer afternoons. But she said she had her "regular old recipes" in her head and why on earth would I want to put those in a cookbook anyway? But I finally convinced her that I wanted her "regular old recipes". 

Talking on the phone for these did not work. She couldn't hear that well and hearing over the phone line just was too painful for both of us. So getting recipes from Grandma was me sitting down with her and asking, "How do you make this?" and me writing what she told me on a steno pad. 

Then, when the baby was born I furiously worked to transcribe everyone's recipes to something that I could make into a book for Christmas presents. D. was born the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So I didn't have a lot of time. So, on my maternity leave....when the baby was sleeping, I was typing. 

It wasn't a typewriter...it was a computer. But it was one of the early versions of a Mac. And I didn't have any way to add clip art or anything snazzy. Just words. There was no spellcheck (evidentially) because there are plenty of typos. But, I got the pages completed and took them to the copy/printing company and had copies made and then had them spiral bound into a book. 

Not bad for the tools I had to work with! We moved many, many times after I made that book. And I lost track of where it was. Until today! Just pulled this out of a box in the garage. 

I gotta say I need to make a new edition! Too many of the people that I love and that I know have good cooking skills are not represented in this book. 

I may be asking for recipes soon.