Just for Fun: A Couple Handwritten Recipes

My sister scanned a couple of our grandmother's recipes. I took them and "prettied" them up, but kept the aged look that they now have.

These were handwritten and then sent to my mother (probably in the 1960s).

Enjoy.

Pin Pillow Exchange and Stitching Progress

I received this darling pin pillow from Kathy as part of BeckyBee’s pin pillow exchange. Every day since the April 1st deadline (and even before) I was eagerly watching for the mailman each day in hopes that my exchange would be in the mail. And today it was!

We had a great weekend at the PX ranch – even with some fresh snow both Saturday and Sunday mornings. Lots of great food – from roasted turkey with sausage, cashew, and dried cranberry dressing and roasted asparagus, to freshly gathered eggs scrambled and served with grits and PX ranch bacon. I made Ina Garten’s Easy Sticky Buns. Yummy, and yes, they are extremely easy because they are made with frozen puff pastry dough. We even had enough to warm up the leftovers for breakfast on Sunday, and they were just as good.

Mom and I got one vegetable garden box planted with cool-weather veggies – radishes, both red and white; spinach; leaf lettuce; and cabbage. Tomorrow I’ll head over to my parent’s house and we’ll get the seeds started under grow lights for tomatoes, peppers, and a variety of squash. They should be ready to plant on branding day, planned for May 15th.

I got some stitching in – thanks to taking a floor lamp with a 150 watt bulb to make it easy to see what I was doing. I made good progress on both my Family in Stitches design, as well as another WIP that I’m hoping to finish this week.

A Great Way to Memorialize a Treasured Family Recipe

When I was growing up we would often visit my maternal grandparents in a tiny southeastern Idaho town (and I mean tiny – only 53 people now according to the 2000 US Census).

One of the many childhood memories was my grandmother’s applesauce cookies. She would store them in well-used tin that once held a fruit cake and we – me and my 40 first cousins – could help ourselves to a cookie whenever we wanted. I can only imagine how many dozens of applesauce cookies – made with her home-canned applesauce from apples grown on several apple trees in the yard – we ate. She always made these cake-like cookies with chocolate chips and frosted them with chocolate frosting. Yum!

Several years ago for a family reunion I shared this cross-stitch pattern featuring the treasured applesauce cookie recipe. I adapted a pattern from a Vanessa-Ann book of designs (but unfortunately I can’t find the book in order to give it proper credit). One of my cousins made a couple tweaks to the design as well, and this is the result.

I never stitched a final version for myself, but my mom did one for me and changed the original blues to greens to better match my kitchen colors. So now the stitched recipe hangs in my kitchen, making it easy for me to make grandma’s applesauce cookies without having to look up the recipe.

Click the pattern image below if you’d like to download the pattern and perhaps use it as a starting point for your own treasured recipe design.

Enjoy!