Digging through recipes and time.

One of my new friends had a birthday yesterday. I wanted to make her a treat as a gift so I started digging through my recipes.
Because I am cheap frugal broke lazy  resourceful ,I wanted to find something for which I had all the ingredients on hand.
This required a LOT of digging since I seemed to be missing one ingredient for every recipe that looked good to me.
Here's what I settled on.

"Beehive buns" because she is new to Utah.
Get it? Utah is the beehive state. Stretch?
Well anyway, they were yummy and she seemed happy to receive them.

The recipe came from a very old copy of The Pillsbury Bake-off Cookbook. 1986 I think.

The buns didn't take long to make but I sure spent hours searching through all my recipes. It was like time travel.
I found this binder, and another "spillover one", that I compiled in the late 80s/early 90s.

Complete with tabbed dividers

And meticulous handwritten tables of contents for each section. I even added pages over the next couple of years and added the recipes to the tables of contents. Impressive organization, huh?

Look at that handwriting! So neat and tidy. Computers have been the death of my handwriting skills.
It was fun to flip through this book and see what kinds of recipes appealed to me when I was 20 years old, with 2 babies and settling deeply into domesticity. There are magazine clippings, handwritten recipes, zeroxed copies of recipe book pages. The zerox copies are from library books. I can still remember checking the books out, taking them home and flagging the recipes I wanted to have, then making the copies at the library before returning the books.
I used a "code" to indicate the recipes we've tried. An asterisk meant we tried it and liked it.

This page made me laugh. I would say that I have become a pretty good cook over the years. I can only remember one meal I've ever cooked that we COULD NOT eat. Even the dog wouldn't eat it.
(My brother's dog. He lived with us at the time. And his dog would eat everything. Including her own dog house. Seriously. She chewed holes in her wooden dog house!)
You'll have to click on the above picture to see it, but this page lists that recipe.
No asterisk.
Simply the word "Gross!"
With an "x" at the bottom of my exclamation point.
Seriously? I was 20ish and still putting an "x" at the bottom of my exclamation points?!?! What was I thinking?
And in case there was any doubt in the future, I also crossed the recipe out on the page it's printed on.

It was bad. REALLY bad. Looking at the recipe now, I would be able to tell this wouldn't be something I'd try.
And so many of these recipes are made with ingredients I no longer use or buy. Margarine? blech! And boxed or canned things. Hey! I guess "Semi-homemade" isn't Sandra Lee's original idea after all! ;)
Fast forward to about 5 years ago and I guess the binder method was still appealing to me. I bought these cute binders (in various designs) from somewhere...Costco? Sam's Club?

And I put a few family favorite recipes in them to give to my married daughters for Christmas one year.
I am clearly no longer as organized as I once was because many times, clippings get shoved into the handy pockets inside this binder.

And I often have to dig through my current recipe filing system to find a recipe that I need. It is a system with many parts. See here...*

And.....thick stacks of Every Day with Rachael Ray magazines and a handful of Food Network magazines that a neighbor gifted me.
Oy! Yet another case of having known so much better when I was younger. LOL
But really, HOW did I do it back then? I had two young kids! How did I get them to leave me in peace long enough to copy all those recipes by hand? To make that uber organized recipe binder of, not recipes that we loved, but thousands that just looked interesting to try?
I only have one young kid right now and he barely lets me have five minutes for a shower.
It was an unexpected trip down memory lane to sift through all of it though.
There are recipes handwritten by my girls from the cooking classes they took in high school.
And a FANTASTIC banana cake recipe from my old friend Marlys, which I made for Amber's birthday one year.
And the cream puffs recipe I used to make the tuna puff sandwiches for Kayleigh's first wedding.
And a small collection of favorite chicken recipes from the early part of my first marriage when my husband only wanted to eat chicken. Weird because he loves beef too. Maybe I scared him off of having me cook beef when he saw me pounding on a ribeye steak to "tenderize" it just before we were married. Ha ha!!
Inspiration pictures for most of the birthday cakes I've made for the grandbabies. And a couple of little pamphlets of children's birthday cakes from when I first decided to try making cute cakes for my own kiddos.

Ahhhh......it was a fun little trip.

I remember feeling so different than my peers back then. Other than the obvious differences like being married and having babies in my teens.
But I had a true DESIRE to be a homemaker. Right THEN! I felt like a displaced 1950's housewife. So behind the times.
And look what's happened now. Domesticity has fallen back into favor. Women are taking a new interest in cooking, cleaning, organizing, canning, baking, sewing, etc, etc, etc again.
Maybe I was really AHEAD of the times.
Yeah. I'm gonna go with that.


*Jaxon insisted on getting his "pumpkin guy" in the picture. Heather gave it to him when she babysat for me last week. It has not left his sight for 7 straight days. It's a cheap flimsy Happy Meal type of toy and he loves it! He even sleeps with it.
Simple boy. Gotta love that kid!