a retro post for g-man

Here is a glimpse of the copy write date on my old cook book. not too terribly old but all of grandmas good recipes got thrown out back in the late '90's when my cousin was with her. she had a terrible time after grandpa passed and my cousin was a real hag to treat her the way she did but at least i got this and all the old photo albums. i have my grandmas baby picture it was a portrait taken when she was about 18 months old. a very coveted painting and when i get enough money i am going to put it in a proper frame and have it on my wall. i am blessed with memories of my family.
this is the cool part of the book, my grandmas notes. when i go online to look for recipes i always look for reviews, i don't trust a recipe that has not been tested by at least 25 other readers, and here my grandma has rated some of her faves and some she does not like!! tested and true!!
she also adds where she has adjusted the recipe!! i know she didn't try them all but i can go through and see when she did and some of them were later like 1991!!
some recipes she pasted in from various newspapers. i think she was trying to only have one cook book at one time but that failed, she used to have long recipe card boxes the old tin ones like what they used to have in libraries and these were chalk full of hand written recipes, my cousin, the ass, threw them all out. i would have loved to have them.
so again here is the front of the old book, i thought about buying a new one just to compare it but that really doesn't seem like a good way to spend money i also have a 3 ring binder and a recipe card box with tons of tries some not so good some great recipes. and my bookmark page on my computer has some great ones as well as Mamahollioni's kitchen!! she has wonderful recipes, I love her fried zucchini!! suffice it to say i love to cook and i love trying new recipes, we are going to try some turkey gyros this week i will let you know if the recipe is good or not!!
here is my pie crust recipe, it is funny i was at a friends house a while back and they were watching Alton Brown and he was making a pie crust, did you see the episode? he put nuts or beans in the crust to cook it and all this elaborate foo-foo ways of measuring the temperature of the water i mean it took him like 2 hours to prep and get the pie crust ready, to have the 'perfect crust'. give me a break real cooks look for fast effective and great recipes, we got other things to do with our time then wasting it filling our crusts with farva beans!!
as you can see my book is a bit tattered, the sign of a well used book!! it gets hard to find the pages i look for when i am using this book but it is so worth it.
here grandma pasted a recipe and i am not sure why, her notes indicate the recipe needed a lot of work and was a bit bland. but when she doctored something up she usually wanted to keep it after for a possible use. sometimes her recipes weren't too good but i try them anyway.

so this is where i get my pie crusts from to make my holiday pies. i don't buy the ready made crusts it seems like such a waste when i can make my own for a few pennies. i meant to post this before Christmas but as you can see it took 12 days for me to get my computer back!! my sister was here till 10 o'clock last night finishing up her homework, Wes is back at work today and 'A' is at school a nice and quiet morning with my girls. snow has turned to about an inch and a half of ice on my windshield. we got about an inch left but it is like 12 degrees out there and the side streets never get plowed so we have a bit of ice out there.

We had Wes's mom here until new years eve when we took her home, i had a wedding to get to and i missed it we also had another wedding on new years day but missed that as well we were just too busy to get to them.

my brother came over after a bit of drama with my sister and a doctors appointment, i told him he was welcome to come over but only if there was no fighting or bickering. he behaved but he wanted to cook in my kitchen!! and ask anyone who knows him he is not always a good cook and it scared me!@! it was very hard not to be controlling and to allow someone to help me. thankfully i had all my pies done and all i needed to do on christmas morning was make my stuffing and stuff my bird. my mother and grandmother had a specific way they always made their stuffing and that is how i make it as well. when he simply asked to help me i about came unglued!! my stress levels were at like a bazillion!! no way this was the one thing i make every year!! it was almost sad but thankfully i practiced some self restraint and left it at that. it felt as if my head was rolling with everything happening.

with the christmas eve dinner and the extra 2 families coming over i had 6 pounds of meat to cook and i cooked 2 pounds of beans and we went to the tortilla factory to get fresh tortillas because there was no room in my house to make them, my brother could but the mess he makes when cooking it takes me twice as long to clean when he is working!! i had the mother of one of the families bring over some spanish rice and my sister split the cost of food with me so it wasn't all dumped on me then my sister lied to her husband and told him we were providing the food and it was crazy!! honesty is a foreign word in my family they prefer to manipulate and skirt around the truth, to be direct means to be a jerk in their eyes. this is how i grew up and change is what i have managed with recovery, i see where i could be with my life if i were not practicing a good program.

the most difficult part was my brother and his twisted perception on things and allowing him to have his own truth, even if it was wrong. he got some news that he may need dialysis and he tried to tell me that dialysis is what killed my mother. and in the most gentle way i could possibly tell him i said; 'oh, honey, no, cancer killed mom, not dialysis.' and he actually said the following and i am not quoting but this is real close; 'no sue, mom was the first person she set a precedence because no one ever had dialysis and cancer at the same time before, they would have been able to stop the cancer if she wasn't on dialysis!' i mean come on, my mother had stage 4 small cell lung cancer she had a tumor the size of a tennis ball on her upper right lung and it was inoperable. he tried to tell me that small cell is not a death sentence. this from the man who disappeared for 3 months after my mother was diagnosed my sister and i put out a missing persons report on him and it was pretty scary. you know to try and tell me he knew more about my mothers illness then me was really difficult to handle. mom lived with me up until the last 2 weeks of her life, i was the one who took her to every single doctors appointment, every dialysis, every chemo every radiation therapy and he is going to try to tell me something different.

a few deep breaths later and i simply let him have his history and i left it alone, some people you can help and others you cannot, he is one who will not get help. his is like a fish out of water struggling for every breath he takes and the road ahead is clear, and he refuses to take it. instead this child is one who refuses to use a recipe when he cooks, so nothing ever tastes the same, he cooks by 'feel' and 'smell'. it is like cooking with 'the force'. i swear he is this silly, and he changes his truth to fit his needs on a daily basis. he is lost and sad and no one is there to take care of him and i am not responsible for him. i cannot fix it, he needs to cowboy up and be a man and take care of himself, instead he lives off other people and does not work and is waiting for his disability to come in, at 33 years old and to top it off he is now on methadone. but he is not an addict because it is prescribed for pain.

watching him go through his sad life is hard and i think i handled it really well over the holidays. today i am grateful for my life i haven't done a gratitude list in a while so here goes;

1. today i am grateful for my beautiful 3 year old daughter, whose eyes are so dark when you look into them i swear you are swimming in the seas of heaven.
2. today i am grateful for my 4 year old daughter, whose smile absolutely radiates with happiness.
3. today i am grateful that my bean still comes out of her room to sleep with mommy and cuddle with me, i embrace every moment, i am not ready to make her go back to her room yet. i think i will take my time with her...
4. today i am grateful for my recovery and the work i have done in my steps to allow me some integrity and humility in my life today.
5. today i am grateful for my family, my new family and old. it is good to grow in numbers and to have a strong family is amazing.
6. today i am grateful to celebrate the holidays with my wonderful family.
7. today i am grateful my girls and i believe in Santa Claus.
8. today i am grateful for Christmas presents.
9. today i am grateful for the giggles my girls make when the play together.
10. today i am grateful for the noises in my house, it is not quiet but it is full of laughter and love and that is something i didn't always have growing up.

boy did i need that gratitude list. thanks for stopping by and this leaves me with todays thought; "Anxiety is loves' greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."- Anais Nin