Finding a treasure….

My Mom gave me a great gift yesterday! When she handed it to me, I was a little confused at first….

For a second, I was going to say “Are you giving me a bible!?” But then I opened it up.

It’s a recipe scrapbook! Someone donated to a club she belongs to. They are having their annual “trinkets and treasures” sale this weekend and someone gave them this book to sell! There are hundreds of recipes in it. Some handwritten, some with notes, dozens and dozens of recipes clipped out and pasted in. The oldest newspaper article was from 1968! As soon as my Mom saw it, she knew she had to get it for me.

I had so much fun looking at each page. Reading the old recipes, reading her notes. It’s like looking through someones diary! As the pages wore on, the handwriting gets more shaky, but this clearly was owned by someone who loved to cook and bake and entertain.

I love the above page which details ideas for appetizers!

She had several pages of menu planning, when to start things, how long dishes would take to cook, etc…

The above page is a hoot. “Men’s favorite tossed salad” Apparently putting fried onions from a can on top of a salad will please any man!

In the back of the binder, is a place where there were tons of hand written cards, some written on scraps of paper, or a recipe card

Also, there are about a dozen hand written recipes that maybe a grand daughter wrote? One of the titles was “grandma’s favorite oatmeal cookies”.

My kids and I had a great time looking at all the recipes. So much so, that my son Mark found a recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and he gave me that look like “can we make these tonight?” I did have all the ingredients, so we did! He he read the ingredients while I added things to the batter.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 sticks of butter, melted (I used just one)
1/2 cup of chocolate chips
1/2 tsp. water (I’ve never seen that in a cookie recipe, but added it anyway!)
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar

Beat together the sugar and butter. Add the eggs, extract, water, the flour and salt and baking soda. Mix until well incorporated. Add the chocolate chips and peanut butter and mix again. I put the calories in www.caloriecount.com and it gave me a grade of F! I wonder why? 🙂 I used a melon baller to make each cookie small and uniform. This batch actually made 64 cookies! Even so, each cookie is 103 calories, 7 grams of fat, so proceed with caution!

Bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Let cool on the rack a few minutes before removing or else they kind of crumble. They need to set before removing from the cookie sheet.

They were pretty great though!

So, here’s my question, would you donate or throw away a book like this? I wish her name was in it somewhere, or where she lived. I’m sure she’s long passed away by now, but even if her family doesn’t have this legacy, I will never part with it…

It also got me to thinking what a great collection this could be, finding recipe books at Estate sales, garage sales, good will….I may have added another hobby to my list!

Thanks Momma! I love this gift 🙂