Read, Shred then Burn

My grandmother was not the greatest cook when I knew in her later years (the best thing I can say about her cooking was that she was an excellent businesswoman). However, she had a fondness for trying new things. When we cleared her house for sale, we found about a dozen recipes cut out from newspapers and magazines, taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinets. Her cookbook shelves held, besides the many cookbooks she owned, were some of the “magnetic” page photo albums with many more recipes.

Even from the beginning of my cooking years, I would still play around with formulas. Mama still remembers my years of Dill Overload, when I was first introduced to the herb, and tried it in every savory dish I made. Still, I will go back to the original recipes to see if I need to go another direction. Part of the reason I do that is because memory sometimes fails us, especially as we get older and do more stupid things to our brain cells. So sometimes a recipe can change from year to year, unless we go back to the original source.

After the years of clipping, we now have multiple cooking shows (on multiple channels) each with their own websites. There are also a lot of cooking blogs where we share our recipes. Each author and chef has their own style and taste, and each recipe is expressed in a different manner. It doesn’t need to be regional to have these changes, either! Just with three cooks in our house, there’s seven different ways to make a simple dish of pasta!