I love to bake, and I may love to cook. I have tried to start improving my cooking skills with some newly gifted cookbooks, and I talk about that experience here. With more rest and more time, I hope to develop a better appreciation for the art. I have long been fascinated by cookbooks as I am by all other books. So they and a random hodgepodge of printed, ripped out of magazine, photocopied recipes certainly contribute to my clutter. You guys. We keep our recipes from our delivery meals. We use EveryPlate and we keep the instruction cards. And yes, sometimes we even use them multiple times.

My mom didn’t love to cook. But she did have a fair share of cookbooks and recipes that she counted among her favorites. I’m a tad disappointed that many of her recipes are in MY handwriting because she thought it was so much neater, but I did capture a few back in the day with a cook/scrapbook project I did to capture some favorite family recipes for my siblings and me. As we cleaned out the house this summer, we each chose the cookbooks that appealed to us. Some were left behind. (My siblings helped me to let go - Can’t keep everything with her handwriting in it. I know they were right.) We put them in the yard sale. And…here is what happened. A woman who was browsing bought them. She cried as she told me that her family had gotten rid of all the cookbooks that her mom had written in. She was going to cook through these and enjoy my mom’s notes. I’m glad we shared. I’m glad I kept a couple.

Back when my daughter got married (2015), I bought a book to record the family favorites for her. Then I couldn’t find it. Book clutter is real; the process of dealing with that is coming. I have since stumbled upon it and am thinking of going through the drawer of doom and copying into it some of my favorites that are just floating around in there - to get rid of the paper mess. She may ultimately end up with the book anyway. I should PROBABLY get rid of the cookbooks that I HAVE NOT TOUCHED in years. (How are you betting?) The new ones are on display, and I am genuinely committed to using them, recording notes for my kids to worry about someday (or perhaps for a stranger who needs the comfort), and trying new food to get us out of a rut. I’ll be sharing them in the cook book articles. Hopefully recording this here will help me be more accountable about that.

And last, but certainly not least, spaghetti, which has long been one of my favorite foods. I love it - with meat sauce, with meatballs, if I’m dieting, with just sauce. Since I married in 1988, I have enjoyed my spaghetti with my in-laws’ homemade spaghetti sauce. They grow the tomatoes (most years) and transform them into this delicious sauce. This spaghetti sauce is the only one that my kids know. As our family grew, my mother and father in law single handedly kept the whole family in sauce. My kids in college got homemade sauce. Time is a thief. Cancer and age made this task pretty difficult this year. So…my husband and I got our lesson. Two different Sunday afternoons we stepped in to learn the craft. Let’s be clear, they had the process honed to perfection. We had much to learn, and like driving a car, I suspect when we step into the kitchen ourselves someday, it will be a bit like we had never practiced. But I am grateful that we are preserving the recipe that is so much at the heart of our family and that we are learning from the experts. I hope that we can continue in love as they have done - that someday our grandboy will remember our sauce and that it will remind him of the love that his great grandparents have for him and his parents and his grandparents. And the love we have for him is well. This…is something we will keep.