Fun With Cooking

Every few years, someone gets you a Christmas present that is...inspired. My mother-in-law really wowed my husband last year with an original 1961 Betty Crocker cookbook. She found it on eBay, as I recall. She has had the same cookbook since hubby was a child, and it's still sitting on her shelf. You can tell which recipes are family favorites by which pages are stained and warped.

Now we have the same cookbook, but with the unknown history of another family in its pages. Judging by the big red star by "spaghetti, how to cook" in the index, I'm guessing that it was originally a wedding present to a novice cook.

Today I opened it to find the stuffing recipe that hubby can't live without on Thanksgiving. While I was paging through, I came across this:



How cool! I thought. I wonder what recipes the mysterious former owner deemed important enough to tape in the cookbook. The top one is cooking instructions for...spaghetti, clipped from a Skinner's brand spaghetti box. The one under that is for "Baked Chicken Salad". But the one on the bottom, taped carefully to the page itself, is the best of all.



And what is that note on the tissue paper?



Well! I take back my original assessment. This lady knew how to cook.