My Recipe Box

Last fall I sat down and finally copied over all the recipes that I thought I might want for future use from my dad's famous, old wooden recipe box in the fire safe and my mom's various recipe albums (she prefers those little photo albums that you can get at the dollar tree) and from the tattered blue folder on the cookbook shelf where we keep "random recently used recipes" printed off the internet for experiments.

My good friend, Barbie, gave me a very nice metal recipe box with holes punched in it in the shapes of pineapples. I also had a smaller wooden recipe box from a local school-turned-antique-store where I often go Christmas shopping with my siblings and mother and grandmother.

Ever since, the two recipe boxes have lived on top of my red wardrobe. The metal box holds recipes I'm likely to need or want, the wooden box holds recipes kept purely for sentimental value - I mean, I could live and die quite happily without ever tasting chickenetti one more time. But, since Helen gave it to me, and since a lot of old ladies have probably given it to their younger friends, it shall be kept ad infinitum. Someday years from now my great, great, great grand niece will open her recipe box and shuffle past an heirloom chickenetti recipe to get to the 'plasma fluff' recipe or whatever it is the cool kids will be cooking up then. 

But some recipes are more precious to me than the chickenetti one. Some recipes, like my mom's coconut pie (a completely different concoction than any coconut pie you have ever tasted), and my great grandma's raisin filled cookies, and my sister's cajeta, and my Aunt Margie's gingerbread - some of those recipes could never be replaced by any old recipe on cooks.com and some of those recipes only have one or two copies in the universe, which would disappear in the event of a house fire.

What to do?

Why, digitize them, of course!

And so, I present my online recipe box: https://anniesrecipebox.blogspot.com/

It's pleasantly ironic to me that the same heirloom recipes that have been kept in boxes for my entire childhood beside the old blue folder of printed out recipes from the internet may now well be printed off by some other people way out there in the cosmos and kept in other folders or boxes or albums beside their own heirloom recipes. 

Bon appetit!