My recipe book

This is a picture of my most invaluable piece of equipment in the kitchen.  It is a notebook that I put tabs on and divided up into sections for the recipes I use often for my family.  I have a lot of other recipe books but got tired of trying to remember which book had which recipe in it.  This works really well because as I try new recipes I add them to this book if they get a thumbs up from the family. 

I still have the other books they just sit on a shelf in the downstairs kitchen in case I need them for reference or want to look up a new recipe to try.

This book has breakfast, bread, vegetables, main dishes, casseroles, sauces and rubs, and seasoning recipes in it.  I have a separate book for desserts, sweets, and snacks and a separate binder for canning and preserving.  I like to look through this book because you can see in the margins where I have made changes or tweaked the recipe for something different or to suit our tastes.  Or maybe you will find a bible verse.  You can also tell the recipes that are used a lot because there are smudges, oil, and sometimes food on the pages.  You can really tell that this is a much used and much loved book by looking at it.

This reminds me of my Grandma and her books and pieces of paper she used to have laying all over the house.  It seems like she was always writing a recipe on a piece of paper to try in the future.  When she passed away quite a few years ago, she had tons of binders that she had written in.  Everything from recipes to bible verses to pictures to cards she had received and kept to quotes she found particularly poignant.  It was really neat to go through these books and remember the past and celebrate her life.

We purchased blank recipe books for our girl's for Christmas with hopes that they would continue the family tradition.  I have been encouraging them to write down the recipes that they like in hopes that they can take the books with them when they have a home of their own.  This next year I am hoping to really dig into some cooking with them and try some new and fun things.