Recipes for Life

The holidays are coming up and I like to give homemade gifts.  I  decided to do some canning. This happens  every 5 years or so. It's like having a baby or a doing a garage sale, it takes awhile for me to forget how much pain or time it took to do it.

My mom used to can every year but it wasn't because she necessarily enjoyed it.  My Dad always grew a big garden and she didn't want to waste it. They would annually get into an argument about how he grew all this stuff and then drug it through her clean house and plopped it all down in the kitchen sink for her to can.

 

Loved the dill pickles! I ask Mom about it, but unfortunately she's 90 years old and doesn't remember  recipe details anymore. So out of the cabinet came the recipes.  Rather than  looking it up on the internet or saving the recipes in a word file, the pre-internet women  just wrote or typed each one down and stuck it in a box. After getting them all out, I thought that perhaps I should get them in order , organize them ,  type them and put them in a word  folder. They were after all kind of a mess.

 

Other than recipes , I found  little blessing and memories. Old notes from my kids written on recipes that I had left out on the counter. "Went to Jakes. Don't worry Mom, I did my homework. Be home by 6:00." A recipe for sugar cookies written by my Grandma. My grandma never went to school but wrote fairly well and always signed her last name only . She just signed it "Whitten". A stack of recipes, Mom typed and gave to me when I got married. She obviously knew I was completely clueless regarding cooking from these recipes. They were simple recipes, like spaghetti or meatloaf.  She was right though, I WAS completely clueless. I also found these little tips written down in mom's writing in a variety of locations.  They were interesting so I'm sharing them with you.

1. Sciatic Attack: Potassium, remember it helps to ease the pain.
2. Cold sores: dab a painful blister with Pepto Bismal every few hours.
3. Bee Sting: Make a paste with baking soda and water and dab it on the bite.
4. Sunburn: Baking soda in bath water, let it dry on the skin, no towel.
5. Swimmers ear: equal parts of alcohol & vinegar, use eye dropper.
6. Black scuff marks on the floor: Use petroleum jelly on a cleaning rag.
7. Dirty Blinds: Use a clean paint brush, it's cheaper than buying expensive blind cleaning tools.

 

As for my pickle recipe, I found it in several locations, typed and written down. One of the written down ones made me smile, scribbled on the bottom, it said , "Clean up John's mess." :)

 

Organize these? No way! What was I thinking? I can't throw this stuff away.  Good memories don't come in word files.