For those who are just joining this meme in progress: I was recently wondering why traffic to my blog had gone WAY down almost instantly. I was also not getting any comments on my Facebook updates. Turns out that Facebook made some changes to their privacy settings that broke my status updates, and I was no longer broadcasting to the world on Facebook, which is where a huge chunk of my traffic came from. I had all of my FB friends broken up into those who could see my status updates and those who couldn’t. (Mostly, it was to keep those “friends” who aren’t really friends or who tend to get all judgmental and preachy-preachy from having easy access to my thoughts.) Facebook removed the ability to hide status updates based on list, and so as a result, set my status to “Show to Only Me.” This has been resolved, and now we can expect our usual trickle of web traffic to return.
Day 23 – A picture of your favorite book
I’m generally not one who is particularly sentimental about things, but recently, I was thinking about some traditions that are getting lost or are dying in our technological world, and it made me a little sad. I was talking with my mom, and she said that she has my great-grandmother’s recipe collection, and I got to thinking: When my mother passes away, which will hopefully not be for several decades, one of the things that I would most want is her recipe collection. Boxes of cards with handwritten recipes and notes, notebooks filled with scribbled instructions and ingredients. Food is such an important part of life, and helps to form such strong memories that having a copy of my mom’s recipes in her own handwriting would be a powerful link to my memories of her in the past.
I have a ton of recipes scattered all across various sites on the internet, most of them either recipes I found through Google searching or via some cooking experimentation of my own. But I don’t have them collected anywhere. I don’t even have a paper copy of my Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies. So I decided that I was going to go out and buy a book to start writing down and collecting my favorite recipes.
I tell you what: finding a recipe book is hard these days. Nobody carries them. Even stores like Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Sur la Table, and Williams-Sonoma don’t have any sort of recipe organization products. On a whim, I stopped off at the local Barnes & Noble, and found the book pictured above. It was the only recipe book they had in the entire store. I couldn’t find recipe card boxes or dividers (by food category) or those plastic sleeve protectors for 3×5 or 4×6 recipe cards.
I think it’s sad that we’re losing our connection to our culinary heritage to such an extent that in a city like Seattle, I have to go to five different stores to find a recipe book, and that store only has one relatively ugly example. With so many recipes available so easily, I can understand it. But it’s sad. There’s something special about flipping through a stack of well-worn, handwritten cards for that special meal you used to request on your birthday.
So, my new recipe book is my favorite book. It’s only got one recipe in it so far: my newly-perfect recipe for Caramel Pecan Rolls. (Recipe coming in the next post!) But I have it sitting out on the writing desk in my bedroom, and every night before I go to bed, I’m writing out another recipe.
And mom, you better specify what happens to your recipe collection in your will, because if not, I have a feeling that Megan and I are going to come to blows over who gets it.
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